Minimum government: The Hindu Editorial on breakdown of governance in Delhi – The Hindu

The communal violence that has claimed 42 lives since Sunday has been subdued but tensions continue to simmer in Delhi. Stories of human courage and camaraderie that shone through amid orchestrated mayhem offer hope, but what rankles is the complete breakdown of governance from top to bottom in the national capital. Several credible accounts of horrendous acts of omission and commission by the Delhi Police have emerged. Instead of taking the police to task and wringing them into action, the Central government and the Delhi Lieutenant-Governor have fielded the Solicitor-General to shield them from judicial scrutiny. The Centre’s position in the court that action cannot be taken against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders who made incendiary speeches until the police had perused all such speeches is analogous to arguing that one criminal cannot be probed unless all others are also probed — a bizarre logic. The Delhi High Court, which took up the matter with the urgency that the situation demands on Wednesday, incapacitated itself a day later as a different bench headed by the Chief Justice D.N. Patel put the case off to April 13. Meanwhile, Kapil Mishra, one of the BJP leaders against whom police action was sought, called for a rally on Saturday, purportedly for peace but clearly intended to stoke the fire. The arguments of the country’s law officer were a public admission of the government’s refusal to act against members of the BJP. With such blatant partisanship and abdication of responsibility, the government cannot be expected to stop violence and restore communal peace.