Delhi’s Lost Leaders

Mangalore Today/India Today

Harsh reality of governance catches up with AAP as Arvind Kejriwal takes his fight to the streets.

There he sat, surrounded by his council of ministers outside Rail Bhavan, dressed in a blue aam aadmi sweater, a grey aam aadmi muffler, and erupting every few minutes into his violent aam aadmi cough. There he slept, on the side of the road in the bitter cold, next to his aam aadmi car, draped in his aam aadmi quilt, waking up early in the morning when the Delhi Police did not allow mobile aam aadmi toilets to be brought into his garrisoned enclosure.

India’s commonest man, Arvind Kejriwal, who had risen like a righteously indignant messiah railing against petty corruption, corporate nepotism, criminalisation of politics, and politicisation of crime, is in danger of losing his moral high ground. The method, the timing, and particularly the motivation behind the Delhi Chief Minister’s impromptu dharna in India’s most high-security zone is now being considered a mistake by several supporters of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

 

The India Today Group-CVoter Mood of the Nation Poll conducted between December 16, 2013, and January 16, 2014, captures the rise of Brand Kejriwal. Indians consider him the most honest politician, and want him as prime minister if there is a non-Congress, non-BJP government. But two days into the agitation, on January 21, Kejriwal was forced to beat a hasty retreat as public opinion strongly swung away from him.

In the end, he got neither of his two demands. The Delhi Police was still under the control of the Central Government, and the two policemen he wanted suspended were sent instead on paid leave. Like any politician would, Kejriwal called the crumbs thrown his way a "victory of the people". His own sympathisers, including entrepreneur Captain Gopinath, author Chetan Bhagat, and former Karnataka lokayukta Justice Santosh Hegde, have now gone on record questioning his conduct. Middle-class endorsement to the party, which has collected a multitude of achievers as it slowly gained critical mass ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, has been sharply eroded. As AAP seemingly fulfils every misgiving, and every exaggerated caricature, about the ineffective administration it would deliver, the romance of campaigning is being swept away by the harsh reality of governance.

The fires lit by AAP leader Kumar Vishwas’s frivolous statements that have managed to offend castes, classes and regions, all at the same time, by AAP member Prashant Bhushan offering his personal view on national issues such as Kashmir, and by Delhi Law Minister Somnath Bharti’s vigilante raid on foreign ’drug lords’ and ’sex mafiosos’, culminated in a bonfire of vanities supervised by Kejriwal himself. The scenes from January 19 to 21 were bizarre and controversial. The moot point, which is worthy of debate-should the Delhi Police be under the Delhi government-was lost in a haze of hubristic politicking.

While Kejriwal demanded the suspension of policemen, he relentlessly defended Bharti, whose midnight raid on January 16 has been decried by legal experts, human rights activists, and a collection of leading women’s groups. There was a point when Kejriwal asked the police, that same one he was fighting, to shed their uniforms and join his ranks. And there was a famous occasion when Kejriwal called himself an anarchist. To a reporter who later asked if he was being satirical, Kejriwal replied: "Who says I’m being satirical? I meant what I said: I am an anarchist." All that was left perhaps was for the Army tanks parked at India Gate in preparation for Republic Day celebrations to start rolling down Rajpath to fulfil some grisly farcical fantasy.

But even at the end of this circus, insiders and supporters feel that AAP’s larger message of systemic change still remains valid. As the inexperienced core team met for an hour at Press Club of India once the agitation ended on January 21, the appeal from within was to regain lost ground, reboot, reconsider how often the dharna card should be used, and refocus on first proving that they can govern.


The Big Idea

On the afternoon of January 21, while central Delhi was still under siege, AAP ideologue and one of its prime movers, Anand Kumar, was at lunch in a cafe at Jawaharlal Nehru University barely 10 kilometres from ground zero. An affable, energetic, highly respected professor of social sciences, Kumar was part of the core meeting that had decided that Kejriwal should form a political party to offer the people of India a non-Congress, non-BJP alternative.

Over dal-roti and cups of steaming coffee, Anand Kumar, 63, explained the philosophy behind creating a party that would cut through the ’parliamentarianism’ of Indian politics, which is controlled through money and vote banks. "My generation views AAP as our penance for frittering away the mandate given to us in the 1970s through the Jayaprakash Narayan movement," he says. "The idea is to give the people an option so that the lesser-evil theory does not offer regional parties or the BJP-who all indulge in the same kind politics that people are fed up of-a chance to simply carry on. Being agitational, constructive, and electoral are inseparable components of making Indian politics participative instead of representative."

Some say that AAP’s larger principle of Swaraj, which includes political decentralisation, economic stability, and freedom from social bias as inscribed in the Constitution, is now getting lost in a series of contrarian views within the party as it tries to formulate an ideology on issues big and small. It is proving to be a challenge that elements from both the Right and Left-unified by a common goal and by a feeling of disenchantment with their own core ideologies-are sending mixed signals about what the party’s stand will be on various key issues.

Bhushan, for example, took a largely leftist view recently when he spoke of a referendum on Army presence in strife-torn Kashmir. Vishwas, on the other hand, has been seen in YouTube videos offering comments that have been interpreted as "anti-minority, anti-women and misogynist", prompting dancer and activist Mallika Sarabhai to wonder if she had made the right decision by signing up with AAP.

But Anand Kumar says that these incidents should be seen as different windows into various problems that confront India, and that they should not be confused with the ideology of the party. "We know what we want in the short-term and the medium-term. Our manifesto, for example, talks about building 500 government schools, but unlike the Left, we don’t think that private schools are bad. There are some long-term issues, however, which are still in debate. Duality, or dialogue within diversity, is good in any political party. In a new party such as AAP, it just becomes more noticeable."

While this can be sorted out by not talking out of turn, AAP’s biggest threat comes from its self-assumed arrogance of waging a holy war. "The lesson is that we shouldn’t talk out of turn," Anand Kumar says. "Kejriwal must not allow himself to be boxed into categories such as ’anarchist’. He is trying to be a philosopher, an activist, a theorist, and an administrator. But he isn’t yet evolved enough to give himself an ideological self-definition."

So, to sum up the idea of how AAP was created through an analogy: It’s putting the horse before the cart. First they look for people motivated towards achieving a goal for the common good. Then the cart is loaded with goodies through a consensus-primary issues such as anti-corruption mechanisms, transparency, equality, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and longer-term issues such foreign policy, environment and sports, to name just a few.

"Now the focus," Anand Kumar says, talking about the first few weeks of the AAP government in Delhi, "must be to put principle before person."

Losing the Plot

Effective policy changes are only possible in times of peace, and the Kejriwal government’s critical flaw is that it has straightaway engaged in a conflict that is taking away from its opportunity to govern. "AAP as a political party can and must protest. Not the chief minister," AAP member Captain Gopinath wrote in his blog. "He and his Cabinet must govern from their office as there’s a danger of being looked upon as a rabble-rouser which is against the spirit of the Constitution and could diminish the goodwill bestowed by the people."

{mosimage}Another mistake that the government has made is conveniently stretching its argument to link issues that do not quite connect. Bharti’s initial allegation, for example, was about organised crime-that the police in Malviya Nagar in Delhi were in cahoots with drug peddlers and those running prostitution rings. By the time AAP hit the streets with its demand for controlling Delhi Police, however, its leaders had started talking about rape and women’s safety in general-crimes that can only be controlled through long-term social change. Ironically, the law minister allegedly broke several laws in a bid to detain the Ugandans he had charged with being involved in the drugs and flesh trade. "The people have clearly not bought the idea that handing African women to a mob, which has been instigated by a neta, makes women safer-which it does not!" says Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All-India Progressive Women’s Association, one of several women’s groups that have written an open letter to Kejriwal urging him to take action against Bharti.

This overzealous bungling was magnified by the Chief Minister’s lack of table manners-his open defiance of CrPC Section 144, which restricts unlawful assembly around the Republic Day parade area; his comment that the Republic Day celebrations, which his protest could have hampered, are just a bunch of VIPs watching tableaux; his asking who the Union home minister is to tell the chief minister of Delhi where to sit; and his comment that journalists may be good but news media owners are doing the politics of Congress and BJP. As a senior AAP member, who asks not to be named, says: "Understatement is the language of statesmen, overstatement is the disease of politicians. We must not get trapped in it."

With eyes trained on AAP like never before, their leaders have become soft targets whose every action is evaluated and every word scrutinised. Some of the party’s brightest minds realise that just as they changed the political game by wresting power in Delhi, so have the rules of engagement changed for them as well. Aam aadmi symbols are no longer enough. The Kejriwal government is walking on a road paved with good intentions. But there are no shortcuts to creating change.