Ever since the former Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi Manish Sisodia wrote ‘a letter from the jail’ on the ‘politics of education’, one could not but applaud his another effort at attempting to convert his incarceration into some kind of a pilgrimage of penance.
The problem however with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) today is that in the battle of perceptions they do not have the services of their generals of the yore. The well-known media persons/personalities who aided and abetted the growth of AAP in its formative years have all quit its ranks.
No wonder sheer banality has seeped into the narrative they have tried to create thus far in the current battle. First and foremost, the ingenuity of the founding years is missing, and in the present times they are largely ‘musing on the borrowed plumes.’ Last week in these very columns we discussed how Kejriwal’s cry of ‘our time has come’ was taken from Democrat presidential candidate nominee Reverend Jesse Jackson’s famous speech.
The letters from Sisodia written from the four-walls of Tihar jail too has anevocation to it.This reminds us of the “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, also known as the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” and “The Negro Is Your Brother”.
This was an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Black rights activist Martin Luther King Junior. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts. Responding to being referred to as an ‘outsider’, King writes: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
AAP’s media managers have tried to create a narrative about ‘harsh’ jail conditions as was faced by the rights activists in the US. Now can the jailing the of Manish Sisodia be equated with that of Martin Luther King. Yes, if he was jailed 10 years ago when they were part of a public movement against corruption. The clock has turned full circle and today AAP’s second-in-command is in jail facing charges of corruption, something which they had promised to cleanse politics of.
While there are tall claims made by the AAP government regarding the ‘education revolution’ it has unveiled, there are equally strong counter-claims that Sisodia did not bring any value to the already existing education infrastructure in the city. There are also reports and surveys which indicate that the dropout rate from government schools has been higher than they were in the earlier regimes.
Continuing on politics of education, eye brows have also been raised on government school children being asked to pen letters of support for jailed Sisodia. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) chief Priyank Kanoongo wrote to the Delhi police over the installation of a stall at the school for supporting Manish Sisodia.
He said that NCPCR received a complaint against the school for glorifying an arrested accused in the mind of innocent children. A video of the school also appeared on social media, which showed how children were being used by AAP workers in their propaganda against the central government over the arrest of Manish Sisodia.
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Following the CBI, now the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has arrested Sisodia. The former deputy CM has failed to get any relief from the law court in this case too. He going to be in jail for at least another seven days. The AAP leadership must realise that the battle has to be fought on the basis of effective refutation of the evidences presented against their stalwarts than tom-tomming a false narrative.
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president, Centre for Reforms,Development & Justice