It was a battle for broom-upmanship as both Bharatiya Janata Party and Aam Aadmi Party leaders took to cleaning the streets of Delhi on Saturday while blaming each other for the garbage crisis in the city.
"BJP's Delhi chief was last year seen spreading garbage and then cleaning it up himself. Now, BJP is trying to take a revenge on people of Delhi because they didn't vote for BJP," AAP MLA SK Bagga told ANI.
"Who created this crisis? Who bankrupted the Municipal Corporation of Delhi? Delhi will be cleaned when the MCD is free of corruption," added AAP leader Ashish Khetan.
BJP Delhi chief Satish Upadhyay also got into the cleanliness mode, a day after Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi joined striking sanitation workers' dharna outside the East Delhi Municipal Corporation headquarters.
Upadhyay, who also led a cleanliness drive in the capital, blamed Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for the stinking mess, saying the latter was only doing politics and not bothered about governance.
The Congress party, meanwhile, blamed both the BJP and the AAP for the capital's sanitation crisis, saying such a thing was never witnessed during Sheila Dixit's rule.
"Both BJP and AAP are responsible for this. It never happened during Congress's rule in Delhi," senior Congress leader Ajay Maken told ANI.
Massive amounts of garbage were piled up in various parts of the city after the sanitation workers in Delhi went on a strike because of non-payment of salaries for the last three months.
On Friday, Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung met the three Mayors and Commissioners of the Municipal Corporations and asked them to persuade MCD employees to call off their strike in the interest of the citizens of Delhi.
Jung informed the commissioners that the Delhi government would be releasing Rs 493 crore on Saturday.
Image: Sanitation workers removing garbage from a road at Radhu Palace in East Delhi, after being assured of salary in next couple of days. Photograph: Manvender Vashist/PTI Photo