Anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare met his former protégé Arvind Kejriwal here on Friday to express solidarity with the Aam Aadmi Party leader’s ongoing campaign against inflated power bills.
AAP sources said it was not only out of health concerns for Mr. Kejriwal, who has been on fast for seven days now, but also to express support to him that Mr. Hazare visited his Sunder Nagri campaign site in North-East Delhi late in the evening.
This development comes after Mr. Kejriwal’s “civil disobedience movement” got support from Justice (retd.) V.R. Krishna Iyer, human rights activist Binayak Sen, the former Chief Election Commissioner J. M. Lyngdoh and the former Naval chief Admiral Ramdas.
According to the AAP, eminent citizens have in a letter urged the Delhi government to “take note of the irregularities brought to its notice by the civil disobedience movement and take urgent corrective action.”
Underscoring that Mr. Kejriwal called for the movement when his pleas to end corruption by instituting a CAG inquiry into electricity bills “fell on deaf ears,” the eminent citizens said: “The citizens of Delhi, most of whom struggle to make both ends meet and simply cannot afford the hiked bills, seek to exercise their right to disobey. They seek to do so in a non-violent manner and are willing to face the consequences including penalties and punitive action.”
Mr. Kejriwal “has made public disclosures with documentary evidence detailing how unjustifiably tariffs are being imposed on the people by private electricity distributing companies which are inflating their costs by buying equipment at highly inflated prices from sister companies; showing reduced recovery from consumers; and by selling excess electricity at artificially reduced rates to sister companies,” said their letter.
The AAP claimed that 3,75,040 people supported Mr. Kejriwal’s campaign. “Around 3,000 volunteers would turn their homes into mini asahyog kendras (non-cooperation centres), in addition to the 264 asahyog kendras that already exist,’’ said the AAP statement, which also underscored that Mr. Kejriwal's health has stabilised.
