Delhi must hope that the last word has been said on the powers of its elected government. For while a decision of the country’s apex court is deemed to be final, the cynic will argue that he had thought so five years ago as well. Much water has flown down the Yamuna since a Constitution Bench delineated the powers of the Delhi government in 2018 and gave it jurisdiction over all but three subjects ~ police, land and public order. That ought to have been that, except the Union government was unprepared to accept a rejection of its interpretation of Article 239AA of the Constitution by which it claimed services were beyond the state’s powers.

Even as the subject, key to effective administration, meandered its way through the judicial process, the Centre’s nominee to Delhi’s Raj Bhawan chose to ram down his interpretation of the law, rather than tackle it with the circumspection warranted by its pendency before the apex court. This has led, especially over the past year, to unseemly bitterness between the elected government and the Lieutenant-Governor. In light of its 2018 judgment, there was little the present Constitution Bench could have done except to endorse it. It has done so, and in ringing words by observing: “The spirit of cooperative federalism requires the two sets of democratic governments to iron out their differences that arise in the practice of governance and collaborate with each other.” Delhi knows, as few regions in the country do, that the spirit of federalism and the desire to collaborate have been far from the minds of those at the helm in the respective governments.

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Acrimony and bitterness have dominated the discourse, punctuated by the electoral successes of the Aam Aadmi Party in assembly and municipal elections, with neither outcome having been accepted gracefully by its rival. It is unlikely that the acerbity will cease, now that powers have been clearly defined. This brings us to the central question argued by the Union government, which is that Delhi being the national capital enjoys a special status. This, according to the Centre, makes it necessary for it to control services, and the absence of such power would interfere with India’s national and international commitments. That being the case, the temptation for the Centre to achieve through Parliament what it could not in court will remain. Delhi’s 400,000-odd citizens in 1911 had little say in the decision to make the city the capital.

But with independence and the adoption of the Constitution, their rights in terms of choosing representatives to their legislature and the manner in which they would be governed ranked pari passu with those of citizens elsewhere. Any usurpation of this right would be unfair. Thus, if the Centre is concerned about national and international commitments, it should restrict its ambit wholly to the area under the New Delhi Municipal Council. The rest of the city is best left to its elected representatives.