SC ruling on Delhi, not a vindication for AAP: Dikshit

Downplaying AAP's victory proclamations over the Supreme Court verdict, former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit today said the ruling that the LG is bound by the government's advice was "not a vindication" for the party as "it has always been so".

The Supreme Court handed a major victory to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in his bitter power tussle with Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal, ruling that the LG has no independent power to take decisions and is bound by the elected government's advice.

"There is no room for absolutism and there is no room for anarchism also," the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court said in a unanimous ruling pronounced by Chief Justice Dipak Misra.

Dikshit, who was the chief minister of Delhi from 1998-2013, said her government may have had differences with the LG, but there was never any "tussle".

"We may have had differences. When the differences came out, after talking to each other we sorted out those differences," Dikshit told PTI after the ruling.

Asked it the Supreme Court verdict that the LG is bound by the government's advice was a vindication for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the senior Congress leader said, "It is not a vindication, it has always been so. We also ran a government for 15 years and whatever the Cabinet decided, the LG used to always agree to that."
Talking about her experience of working with different LG over the years, she said, "We had four or five different LGs, but did not have confrontation... because our first job was to govern and not have confrontations."