IAS association condemns Kailash Gahlot's 'misbehaviour'

The ongoing tussle between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government and bureaucracy escalated on Sunday with the central organisation of IAS officers condemning the alleged "misbehaviour" of Delhi Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot with transport commissioner Varsha Joshi during a meeting on Friday.

"This kind of misbehaviour with officials is just not acceptable. Strongly condemned," the IAS-AGMUT Association tweeted. The move comes a day after transport department official alleged that Joshi was "humiliated" and "threatened" by the minister during the meeting convened to review the replies of the transport department to questions to be asked in the Monsoon Session of the Assembly.

While AAP claimed that Gahlot had refused to approve the answer to a question prepared by Joshi that "no corruption or irregularities were found" at the Burari Transport Authority during the recent visit of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, the commissioner, in her response, stormed the Twitter listing various initiatives taken by the department to ensure efficiency and removal of corruption.

"The idea of a Transport Commissioner- any Transport Commissioner- protecting touts is beyond laughable. However, for the sake of record, I will, in this thread, across the course of the day, lay out the steps we have taken since April 2017 to check corruption (sic)," she said in a series of around 70 tweets she posted during a span of nine hours on Sunday.

Officials at the department said that the minister had alleged that Joshi seemed to want to "shield" touts at transport offices.

The tweet by transport commissioner Varsha Joshi

Mentioning Kejriwal's Burari visit she said, "Burari is a sprawling campus, hampered by terrible traffic flow all around it. We started last year by demolishing a lot of kiosks of touts flourishing in the lane between the VIU and ARU. Some have got a stay, some are on MCD land; we are following up those ones."

However, AAP spokesperson Saurabh Bhardwaj in a statement said, "Anybody and everybody who has a commercial vehicle like autorickshaw, taxi, tempo, bus knows it well that the Burari Transport Authority is a den of corruption. Every vehicle owner needs to get a fitness certificate every year and it cannot happen without agents and touts."

"If touts are openly roaming around in the transport authority (office) and only they can get the work done after being paid, there is a clear nexus. How can touts get the work done without the connivance of transport department officers?" he asked.

The Delhi government has been at the loggerhead with the bureaucrats for the last few months over several issues. The tension between them reached a momentum when Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash alleged that AAP legislatures had assaulted him during a late night meeting at Kejriwal's residence in February.