After doggedly refusing to demit office for more than five months since he was arrested on March 21 in an excise policy scam, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced he will soon do exactly that. The announcement came a couple of days after he was released on bail from Tihar jail by the Supreme Court. While the bench relaxed most of the bail conditions, those by a coordinate bench left him hobbled as they had disallowed him from visiting the chief minister’s office and the Delhi secretariat.
His powers to sign files were also severely restricted. The logical next step was to go back to the court to get the constraints removed. For, Hemant Soren was not subjected to such conditions when he got bail from the SC after 149 days in prison in a land scam. Soren had followed constitutional morality by resigning as Jharkhand CM before going to jail, though the statute does not say it in so many words. He took back the position in a blink after walking out of jail.
However, Kejriwal is anything but predictable. He sought to conjure a spectacle by claiming he would occupy the CM’s chair only after the people’s court cleared his name by giving him a fresh mandate. For him, electoral victory is the ultimate badge of honesty, not exoneration by the judiciary. By extension then, all elected lawmakers are clean, which is absurd. In the process, he framed the next Delhi elections as a Kejriwal-versus-the-rest contest.
A product of the anti-corruption movement, his conscience curiously was not pricked when the Delhi administration went to seed in the 176 days he was in jail because no policy decisions could be taken in the absence of a functional CM. Apparently, he is trying to retake the Mr Clean label and shake off anti-incumbency, as his government’s popularity is visibly slipping.
Since Kejriwal seems not to trust anybody except his wife Sunita, it would be a big leap of faith if anyone else is chosen as his successor as CM. While the state is due for elections in February, he sought snap polls in November along with Maharashtra. But the poll call can be taken only by the Election Commission after the new CM dissolves the assembly and formally seeks early elections. The next few days could indicate how it would all play out.