Chief Minister Office to handle complaints directly
NEW DELHI: Chief Minister Rekha Gupta has announced that her office will now directly handle public grievances, aiming to improve governance in the national capital. Complaint boxes will be installed at the offices of Sub-Divisional Magistrates (SDMs), District Magistrates (DMs), and Sub-Registrars across the city.
After a meeting with senior officials, Gupta called for an upgrade of Delhi's public grievance redressal system to make it more effective. On Wednesday, the Chief Minister chaired a review meeting with the Heads of Departments (HODs) at the Delhi Secretariat. The meeting focused on reviewing unresolved complaints on the Public Grievances Management System (PGMS) portal and ensuring their timely resolution. Departments were directed to take prompt action on pending complaints and prepare Action Taken Reports (ATRs) without delay.
The meeting was attended by the Chief Secretary and HODs from key departments, including Revenue, DUSIB, Delhi Police, DDA, Education, PWD, Social Welfare, Technical Education, Environment and Forests, MCD, DJB, Labour, Irrigation and Flood Control, Health, and Transport.
Gupta criticised past governments for neglecting public complaints, stating, 'Earlier, complaints either never reached officials or were ignored. But our government is fully committed to resolving public issues.'
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In 11 years of Modi's stewardship of the Indian republic, the Indian people have become inured to sometimes numbing targeted cruelty, meted out by state authorities as state policy. Bulldozers raze Muslim homes without any legal process, people who raise voices of dissent are locked for years in prisons without due process, police bullets fell or permanently disable thousands, shrines are flattened, and the police stands by as men are beaten to death by lynch mobs. But even by these abysmal standards of hate politics as state policy, the Indian state recently plummeted to new depths. Credible reports filtered in despite the thick walls of government-controlled media, of 40 Rohingyas – including women, teenagers, seniors and one cancer patient – thrown into the sea from a naval ship. They were abandoned to desperately swim to the shore of Myanmar. This is the land they had fled to escape genocide. When I first heard fragments of this news I responded with utter disbelief. With time this changed to shame and rage. This travesty occurred in the wake of the storms of hate that followed the Pahalgam terror attack. Television studios and right-wing social media handles scalded with anger targeting not just Pakistanis but people they alleged were proxies and supporters of Pakistani terror – Indian Muslims and Rohingya refugees in India. It did not matter that these allegations were Islamophobic, and entirely wild and incendiary. The state did nothing to quell or contradict these contentions. The microscopic population of Rohingya refugees in India, living on the precipice of bare survival at the best of times, felt even more unguarded and exposed. As if to confirm their worst fears, state authorities soon launched campaigns to round up Rohingyas, confine them in detention centres and sometimes, as in Gujarat, to demolish their homes. The news of Rohingya refugees being thrown off an Indian naval ship into the sea was first broken by the media portal Maktoob Media followed by a careful investigative report by Scroll. The events that led up to this began on May 6 and 7, when as hostilities broke out between India and Pakistan, the Delhi Police organised a major crackdown against Rohingya refugees. Scroll reports that at least 43 Rohingya men, women and children were detained after raids on the homes of Muslim and Christian Rohingya refugees in five slum settlements across Delhi: Hastasal, Uttam Nagar, Madanpur Khadar, Vikaspuri, and Shaheen Bagh. At least one Rohingya man was dragged out from a public hospital where he was tending to his wife. They spent hours in police stations without food, then were transferred to Delhi's detention centre for 'illegal immigrants' in Inderlok. They were told that this was only to collect their biometric data. The refugees report abysmal conditions of sanitation, food and water at the detention centre. From there, they were bussed to the Delhi airport and flown 1,300 kilometres to Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Following this, the petrified bunch report being blindfolded, their hands shackled, and boarded on to a naval ship. The sea journey was harrowing. Some women allege being groped and sexually harassed. The authorities assured them that they were being shipped to safety in Indonesia. Three or four hours later, their blindfolds and shackles were removed. Given life jackets, they were all forced to jump into the sea – including older people, children, women and the ailing. Fortunately, they all survived. They reached the shore, but speaking to local people, their dread compounded. They realised that they were not in Indonesia but back in Myanmar, the country they had fled to escape genocide, ethnic cleansing and military crackdowns. They found out that they were in the war-torn southern coast of Myanmar, far from their homeland in Rakhine. Their good fortune was that this patch was not controlled by the military junta. In charge was the civilian National Unity Government in exile, that the military had violently ousted, so the ejectees were safe at least for the present. This horrific tale emerged first from calls to family members left behind in Delhi. To verify the veracity of their accounts, Scroll compared the names and ages of the 40 refugees provided by the National Unity Government with the list of the 43 refugees picked up in Delhi. It found 36 of these to be the same or substantially similar. The Rohingya in Delhi also verified the photographs. These facts seem beyond doubt. That the Indian state chose to pick up around 40 Rohingya refugees – all of whom, incidentally were recognised to be refugees by the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR – in a sudden crackdown, and ultimately threw them into the sea with only a life jacket, close to the shore of a land that they fled to escape genocide. Moe, the minister in Myanmar's civilian government-in-exile, said to Scroll, 'Deporting them while they were attempting refuge is sending them back to the hell they escaped from and survived.' Thomas Andrews, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, described 'the idea that Rohingya refugees have been cast into the sea from naval vessels' as nothing short of 'outrageous', 'unconscionable' and 'unacceptable'. It is true that India did not sign the 1951 Refugee Convention, which protects the legal rights of refugees – defined as persons fleeing persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion. Their most crucial right under the Convention is 'non-refoulement', which bars states from sending back refugees to persecution in their home countries. They also are entitled to secondary rights under the convention, such as to education, work and property. But even if India is not legally bound by the Refugee Convention, international customary law still binds India to not force people escaping genocidal persecution to return to the land where their lives are critically threatened. Not just this. Article 21 of India's Constitution guarantees the right to life and liberty with dignity not only of citizens but all persons in the territory of India regardless of their legal status. The forceful banishment of the Rohingya into the seas near the coast of Myanmar clearly violates both international customary law and Indian constitutional law. And, apart from obligations imposed by the law, India has long argued that even without signing the Convention, it has in practice opened its borders to more refugees than most other countries in the world. Refugees who have found sanctuary in the Indian republic include Tibetans from China, Hindus from Bangladesh and Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils and Chin minorities from Myanmar. It is a proud tradition from which India has ignominiously fallen. With a tradition of centuries' vintage of welcoming the persecuted of the world; a secular democratic Constitution that guarantees the right to life even of those who are not legal citizens; and the obligations of international customary law, how has India today descended to this place? A place in which exceptional cruelty, prejudice and a casual defiance of constitutional obligations and customary international law have become official state policy? India of course has the legal right to return people from other countries who unlawfully entered India. But the law requires that the return of undocumented migrants who are convicted under the Foreigners Act, 1946 must be carefully negotiated with the country of origin. Further, when the country of origin refuses to recognise them as its citizens – like the Myanmar military government refuses to recognise Rohingya people as its citizens – and instead they are threatened with genocidal violence, the forced return of persons to conditions of genocide violates international law, constitutional obligations and the principles of ordinary humanity. The Supreme Court in 2021 underlined that deportations of Rohingya refugees cannot be allowed 'unless the procedure prescribed for such deportation is followed'. It is true also that India does not have a refugee policy. Indian law does not distinguish between refugees and asylum-seekers on the one hand, and undocumented immigrants on the other. But this has not come in the way of India becoming home to persecuted Tibetans, Sri Lankan Tamils and Pakistani and Bangladeshi Hindus. India under Modi in 2019 amended a law to fast-track the grant of citizenship rights to persecuted minorities in India's neighbourhood, with one major exception. This is that they should not be of Muslim identity. The Rohingya are often cited to be the most persecuted minority in the world. They are also from India's neighbourhood, like Hindu minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Why then are they barred not just from citizenship but even long-term visas? Instead why are they stigmatised as both dangerous and parasitical, and in recent years forcefully ejected? Is it only because of their religious identity? Throwing people off a naval ship into the sea is only an extreme manifestation of a policy of 'pushing back' undocumented persons across international borders into the country from which they originated. Effectively a policy of 'pushing back' means that the state chooses to sidestep due legal process and deny persons the right to state their claims to continue to reside in India. The person who the state claims is a foreign citizen might want to claim that she is an Indian citizen, that she is in India because she is related by marriage or otherwise to Indians, or that she is escaping persecution and seeks asylum in this country. The policy of pushing back denies the undocumented person to make and prove these claims. Instead, the state deems unilaterally that the person is an alien who must be forcefully removed from Indian soil. Along with this, by resorting to a policy of 'pushing back' undocumented persons, the state frees itself from the obligation of negotiating through diplomatic channels with the country of origin to accept the alien. Pushing back undocumented persons is not a policy created by the Modi-led BJP government. Angshuman Choudhury in Frontline and Rizwana Shamshad in her book Bangladeshi Migrants in India: Foreigners, Refugees or Infiltrators? record that the Union Home Minister under the Congress government, P Chidambaram, in 1989 reported to Parliament that it had 'pushed back' 35,131 'Bangladeshi infiltrators' through the Assam, Tripura and West Bengal borders. In 1992, the PV Narasimha Rao-led Congress government launched a drive it named 'Operation Pushback' to round up hundreds of so-called 'illegal Bangladeshis' from Delhi and forcibly push them into Bangladesh through its border with West Bengal. In 2011, again a minister of a Congress-led government told Parliament that the Border Security Force undertook deportations in the ''push back' mode' if the identities of the alleged 'illegal Bangladeshis' could not be verified within 30 days. However, under the Modi-led government from 2014, the policies both of detention and 'pushing back' of undocumented persons is driven by testosterone. It has acquired a lethality, force and hyper-masculinity that derives from the central ideological project of the BJP and of its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. At its core lies visceral hatred against the Indian Muslim. Right from his first national election campaign in 2014, Modi alleged grave dangers posed by what he and his party compatriots describe as 'infiltrators', ghuspaithiyas or Bangladeshis. He overheated and deployed this language far more nakedly in the 2024 national elections. His cabinet and party colleagues, led by his closest associate Amit Shah, went much further, including describing them, in 2018, as insects and parasites. What is worthy of note is that when BJP leaders and right-wing trollers rail against undocumented immigrant – who they variously described as infiltrators, ghuspaithiyas, 'Bangladeshis', Rohingyas, insects and parasites – what they really are doing is dog-whistling against Indian Muslims. Their political message is that the Congress and other opposition parties 'appeased' Indian Muslims and illegally opened the borders for Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators only because they would vote for these opposition parties. It is the BJP alone that has the political courage and strength to take on these dangerous internal enemies. Therefore cruelty to the Rohingya is presented to BJP supporters as the gift to the Hindu majority of the strongman Hindu leader. Constructing the Rohingya as an enemy, as an intolerable burden to the nation, however requires considerable suspension of rational reasoning. First consider just their numbers. Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Kirren Rijiju informed Parliament in 2017 that there are 40,000 Rohingyas illegally residing in India. The UNHCR places the numbers today closer to 22,500. They subsist without assistance from the Indian government, typically in sub-human shanties as rag-pickers, domestic helpers and daily wagers. In a country of 1.3 billion people, by what stretch of imagination could 22,500 dirt-poor Rohingya people be considered an unbearable drain on India's resources? The claim that they are terrorists is also a stigma thrown at them only because of their Muslim identity. Not a single case of Rohingya terror has been established to date. India's refusal to fulfil its obligations under its constitution and international law are culpable enough. Even more distressing is the elevation of strongman lawless cruelty as state policy. Angshuman Choudhury observes that in today's India 'the body of the Muslim outsider, particularly the Bengali-speaking Muslim outsider, emerges as the pest'. He continues that 'this body is the homo sacer, a figure that may not be killed, but is also not worthy of saving. The sovereign has absolute power over this body, which is why it can pluck it out of its home at whim, shackle it, blindfold it, put it into a military transport aircraft, and drop it at sea or a mangrove inhabited by man-eating tigers'. He laments with luminous moral clarity, 'Amid the politics, diplomatese, and legality of these forced returns, we must not lose sight of a more fundamental pathology that they represent—a tragic perversion of India's humanitarian ethos and legacy of hospitality towards the weak and marginalised'. Swami Vivekananda in his historic address to the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1893, referred precisely to this legacy when he declared, 'I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth.' I wonder what he would make of his country today, which mercilessly casts the persecuted and refugees from other religions and countries into detention centres more oppressive than prisons, pushes them across borders with bullets flying on both sides, or throws them into the sea to swim ashore to genocidal persecution. I am grateful for research by Rupali Samuel.
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Delhi CM prays at Kedarnath, Badrinath shrines
Chief minister Rekha Gupta on Monday offered prayers at the Kedarnath and Badrinath temples in Uttarakhand, marking 100 days of her government in Delhi. 'The experience filled my heart with unique peace and immense energy… it is by the grace of the Lord that I have been entrusted with the responsibility of serving Delhi...I sought Baba's blessings to fulfil the goal of a 'viksit' Delhi,' she said. Gupta later visited the Badrinath temple. She said she sought blessings from the Lord Badrivishal for residents of Delhi. 'My wish is to see our Delhi become a prosperous, clean, and cultured metropolis — where tradition and progress walk hand in hand… 'Developed Delhi' is not just a vision of physical development, but a commitment to build a capital city where basic amenities reach every citizen—where modern healthcare, education, and other services are available to all, enabling Delhi to emerge as a global city,' she said on Monday. On Sunday morning, the CM had visited Har Ki Pauri in Haridwar and took a holy dip in the Ganga River along with her family before she went to attend spiritual programmes and also visited several spiritual leaders. In the evening on Sunday, CM Gupta participated in the Ganga Aarti in Rishikesh.
