Owners and drivers of these banned autorickshaws, motorcycle rickshaws, tempos, trucks and buses, accompanied by their wives and children, drove down in 2,500 banned commercial vehicles from all across the city to participate in the demonstration. They later submitted a Mercy Appeal to President K.R. Narayanan.

Admitting that they had indeed plied these vehicles on the roads today, J.S. Arora, federation president said: ``More than 2,500 commercial vehicles were driven down to Jantar Mantar for the rally today. Since there was very little vehicular traffic on the roads, it did not lead to any problems. However, we will not ply themon the roads from tomorrow as this would amount to contempt of court.''

So if the transporters are to be believed, these obnoxious smoke-spewing vehicles may be off the roads for now, but they are not out of the city yet. The fear that the vehicles would be impounded are keeping them off the roads, but the transporters admitted that they are not making any effort to sell them. For the present, these vehicles are parked in the homes of transporters. ``Our Mercy Appeal is pending with the President of India and we are hopeful that he will rule in our favour. Anyway there is no point in selling them at the moment as we would not get a good price for them. We are hopeful that the government would give us a fair compensation package for these vehicles,'' added Arora.

However, if the government does not rule in their favour, the federation has decided that they would take out a `Rath Yatra' throughout Delhi to convince people not to vote for the BJP. ``Not only would the government lose our 20 lakh votes, but we are sure that a large number of the Capital's residents will also not vote for them,'' threatened Pawan Arora, the convener of the federation.