‘All over, police is under the state government...Personally, I wouldn’t want to touch this police force’

Rakesh Sinha: Tell us about your early years in Delhi—you went to school here and college?

Delhi went through very traumatic experiences—Partition, the deaths of big leaders. Mahatma Gandhi was killed near where I used to live in Delhi. We heard the three shots that killed him and nobody knew what had happened. Delhi had a very small population. There were broad roads and more open spaces—you could count the cars in the city. The nicest part of Delhi is that you have never seen all of it. The culture keeps changing here, from a Dilliwala culture to a Punjabi culture and now to an almost Bihari culture. It’s a very vibrant city. Earlier, it belonged to nobody and nobody wanted to belong to it. But now it belongs to everybody and everyone wants to come here. As a city, it’s not easy to develop, though: Gurgaon and Noida have got land but Delhi does not have that kind of land, so expansion is restricted. From a small-scale industry and crafts city, Delhi has become a knowledge city, a service city.

Rakesh Sinha: Were you surprised by the way Delhi reacted to the gang rape?

No, I wasn’t surprised by the public outrage. What did surprise me was the act itself. I didn’t expect a

... contd.