Delhi’s Rains Reveal a City Unchanged, With Visions of Venice
A park under water in Delhi (Image credit Rameshwar Dayal, X)
Delhi Rains Bring City to Halt, Ends Honeymoon Period of BJP Govt
By Manish Anand
NEW DELHI, May 2, 2025 — For eight days, Delhi’s residents have turned to YouTube tutorials and historical deep dives into the Indus Valley civilization, seeking lessons on how water can unravel a society. Their curiosity is timely.
On Friday, thunderclouds greeted the city, and for a fleeting moment, cleaner air offered relief from Delhi’s notorious pollution.
But as parents ventured out to drop their children at school, they found their city submerged. Overnight, Delhi had transformed into a patchwork of ponds, its streets resembling the canals of Venice.
A lake-filled Delhi might seem like a poetic rebranding. Arvind Kejriwal, the city’s former chief minister, once envisioned a “city of lakes” during his Aam Aadmi Party’s final years in power. His dream, it seems, has materialized — though not as he intended.
Delhi’s rains bring more than inconvenience; they expose systemic failures. Flooded streets have claimed lives in grimly familiar ways: pedestrians electrocuted en route to railway stations, drivers trapped in sinking cars, and students drowned in illegally operated basement libraries, their deaths evoking apocalyptic scenes.
The owners of these illicit basements, often politically connected, played a role in ousting Kejriwal’s party, which had banned commercial basement use.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), now in power, has long positioned itself as a champion of Delhi’s traders. With Rekha Gupta as chief minister, many hoped for an end to the threats of sealing and demolition that plagued businesses.
Yet Gupta’s tenure has been marked by photo ops over policy. The chief minister’s role, it seems, is to attend as many functions as possible, her images flooding voters’ social media feeds. As her motorcade splashes through the perpetually flooded roads near the Delhi Secretariat, she might note that her February 20 inauguration is fading from public memory. For a city accustomed to short attention spans, that date feels like ancient history.
The honeymoon period for Gupta’s government is over. Delhi’s challenges — crumbling infrastructure, unchecked construction, and recurring floods — remain unchanged. The city may not transform for the better, but its people have a history of holding leaders accountable for broken promises.
From February 20, the job that must have been on top priority would have been desilting of drains. Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over meetings to clean the Yamuna River. The photographs satiated souls of the BJP followers. The PMO may unveil long-term plan to free Delhi from nightmares of a few hours of rains.
(This is an opinion piece; views expressed solely belong to the author)
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