 Who will govern Delhi? The national capital. This burning question has been making rounds from parliament to the supreme court for quite a few years now and it only intensified recently for all the controversial reason thanks to the BJP government at the centre. On March 24th amid heated arguments, condemnations and even a walk out from the section of the opposition, the bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha. The bill caused an uproar in the upper house of the parliament because this amendment is feared to have catastrophic changes the way Delhi will be governed from now on. For starters, the bill seeks to curb the rights of the elected Delhi government. Hence, not surprisingly, the ruling gama admi party in the capital has been protesting against this bill ever since its introduction in the Lok Sabha earlier this month. So what does this bill actually say? It starts off with the meaning of the term government itself. The bill mentions the expression government referred to in any law to be made by the Delhi Legislative Assembly shall means the left in-in governor. This according to AAP simply means that the left in-in governor will be the supreme power in Delhi no matter which party is elected to power by Delhi voters. The implication of the amendment are also far reaching in day to day functioning of the Delhi government. To begin with as per the amendment act LG's opinion will be needed in all the executive orders that the Delhi government takes. This means that any law or order that gets clearance from the Delhi Legislative Assembly will be reviewed by the LG and only after an approval from the LG the scheme or order will be implemented. For example, if the elected Delhi government wants to build new schools and even if the cabinet passes the order to build it the matter will still go to LG for a review. And that also means that if the LG wants he can put an end to it and that's the worry of the Ahmad B. Party which came to power for the second time in Delhi only last year there are still four years left before the elections yet it doesn't matter because the actual power lies with the LG which is appointed by the centre. Mr. Anil Bajal currently holds the post who was appointed by the NDA government back in 2016. Now it's an ironic situation here because in the past all three major parties including the Delhi BJP unit were asking for a complete statehood for Delhi. It was mentioned in their manifesto as well. In fact BJP's last chief minister in Delhi Madan Lal Khurana was a strong advocate for the full statehood of Delhi. The Congress government too asked for a full statehood of the capital time to time. The tussle of who will govern Delhi between up and the centre has been going on for a long time. The core of this tussle is the article 239A of the constitution which puts Delhi in a unique position to have an elected assembly and the left-in-in governor as the administrative head. Centre through LG's intervention oversees land, police and public order as per the existing law. In 2019 a five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court referred the question of jurisdiction of the services to a higher bench. We spoke to Yamini Ayur president and chief executive of the centre for policy research who explained it even better on how things got to this point. In 2018 a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court took a view on the dynamics of this relationship and the unanimous judgment very clearly and unambiguously clarified that it was the council of ministers with the chief minister at its helm that is the executive head of the government of Delhi. Importantly the judgment very clearly stated that requiring prior currents with the LG would negate the ideals of representative governance and democracy thus undermining the spirit of the 69th constitution amendment. The recently passed bill in the Lok Sabha in New Delhi fundamentally undermines this key spirit of the 2018 judgment. It does so by first defining the term government in the context of laws made by the legislative assembly to be the LG not the electric government. Second it expands the powers of the LG by requiring the electric government to seek the LG's opinion on specific matters but it leaves it to the LG to define these specific matters through a general or specific order. Third it weakens the powers of the assembly by prohibiting it from making rules for its committees on day-to-day administration. In essence it leaves the legislative assembly of the Delhi NCT completely powerless undermining the spirit of the 69th constitution amendment in fact making it completely infectious. Now let's leave the technicalities for a movement and shift the focus to the underlying political message behind the centre's recent move. Remember the last time the BJP government's decision was criticised for undercutting an elected state's government's power and thereby exposing the fragilities of our country's federal structure. That's right it was August 5th and the year was 2019. The state government at the receiving end then it was Jammu and Kashmir. This is a familiar playbook. It is precisely through this mechanism that parliament nullified Article 370 re-interpreting the definition of government as the governor and not the elected state legislature thus ushering in central control. So in more ways than one what the government what the what the amendment passed by parliament is doing today in many ways reflects exactly the same set of tactics that were used to render Article 370 nullified in a different context yet with similar outcomes. Overall the challenge as far as the specific concern of Delhi is the challenge of political immaturity failing to be able to effectively negotiate the harmonious sharing of relations between the government and the seat of the national capital and the government that represents the interests of the residents in the national capital. And that is where it all comes down to the formalization of this abuse of power by the BJP government with where a center appointed authority is replacing people selected governments. The latest example of this was witnessed down in the south in Pondicherry where the V. Narayan Sammy government which is the only congress government in the south lost power as such going by what experts point out Delhi is becoming another telling sign of India marching towards an electoral autocracy.