When a much idolised ideologue, gleaming with the glory of idealism, sheds his skin to reveal the lurking charlatan within, it’s not just his fall from grace. It’s also the failure of those who believed in him. Befooled by their own naiveté, they have nobody to blame but their own ideas of revolutionary idealism.
This rise and fall of Arvind Kejriwal is a sordid saga of deception and deceit.
It all began in 2011 for me when I saw a bunch of folks show up in Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, rallying for a Lokpal ie an ombudsman and a law which will contain the rampant corruption and punish the corrupt.
The audacity of the idea was alluring indeed and there were others as gullible as me who took the foolhardy plunge into the India against corruption movement. As an architect of Anna movement, when Kejriwal took on a corrupt UPA govt and Delhi’s Cong govt headed by Sheela dixit he was seen as an RSS proxy.
From Sharad Pawar to Chidambaram, Lalu Prasad Yadav to Salman Khurshid, every leader of the current INDIA alliance was up in arms against this “RSS-BJP” sponsored movement. Countless reams of editorials and TV news cycles on the Anna Movement spoke of it being backed by the right-wing forces to alter the political dynamics in favour of BJP .
The smug certainty with which the politicians, media houses and an entire ecosystem called Kejriwal a BJP imposter was ludicrous. One can hardly blame them and their bovine belief system based on the pro-BJP and anti-BJP binary.
After all he was targeting Manmohan / Sonia govt, running down Aruna Roy led National Advisory Council’s cabal, and demanding action against the 14 ‘corrupt’ UPA II Ministers. For the ‘Secularati’ camp he could not be anything else but an RSS agent.
But Kejriwal was smarter than that and managed to outfox both political camps limited as they were, using each of them to his advantage.
He strategically balanced the presence of Baba Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravishankar along with the likes of Medha Patkar, Prashant Bhushan and Swami Agnivesh during the Anna Hazare days.
At that point of time the singular fixation of the movement was the creation of Lokpal as an institution to decimate public corruption. So much so that when Arvind decided to jump into the electoral fray against the wishes of his mentor Anna , he surreptitiously advocated the slogan “Modi for PM , Kejriwal for CM” making AAAP the crucible which crystallised the mass animus against Congress into a crusade against corruption.
The new political startup fared well in 2013 with AAP winning 28 out of 70, Delhi assembly seats. To the horror of many,Kejriwal took support from the Congress and became the CM for 48 days. The next election in Delhi on 2015 saw a complete annihilation of Congress. In an astute volte face Kejriwal changed tracks and begun to train his guns on Modi.
His 2014 Lok Sabha debut election against Modi in Varanasi saw him become a hero for the anti-BJP political grouping. The same political pundits who vilified him ,now somersaulted and began to revere him, what with their entire intellectual spectrum being limited to pro- BJP and anti-BJP narrative.
He later went on to decimate Congress in Punjab but curiously remained a darling of the faux secularists .
At the risk of confusing their cadres and ranks, Samajwadi Party, NC, TMC, RJD along with Congress did Kejriwal’s bidding despite having been abused and maligned by him earlier. After all, BJP was the bigger enemy. The 4273% increase in Delhi Govt over 10 financial years, [according to Right to Information (RTI)] helped AAP create the illusion of a great Delhi model of governance. So what if a Chief Secretary was assaulted by AAP MLAs Amanutullah and Prakash Jarwal at the behest of the then CM Kejriwal at his official residence in 2018.
So what if, in a cruel political antic, a farmer Gajendra Singh brought to Delhi by Manish Sisodia ended up hanging by a tree and dying at an AAP rally. It was known to all the farmer was depressed and had been threatening suicide. He was merely used as human prop to protest against the govt’s proposed Land Acquisition Bill.
Nobody winced even after the founder members of AAP (Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav} were kicked out unceremoniously by bouncers at an AAP meet. It was however much later when the liquor scam got flagged that Arvind’s holier-than-thou image took a beating. Not only did the Kejriwal government spend nearly 342% more on “Sheesh Mahal” than the tendered cost, but it also ended up illegally annexing surrounding government properties.
The same leader who as an activist cited CAG reports as a war cry against corruption now has 14 pending CAG reports substantiating the dense corruption and turpitude of his tenure.
Shazia Ilmi
Founder Member , AAP