A politician’s identity is his ideology. Once in a baffling blue moon comes along an impenetrable individual, whose sole ideology is himself. Arvind Kejriwal, the bespectacled enfant terrible of Delhi, wearing a trademark check shirt one size too large, and sporting a wispy mustache above a deviously diffident smile, is one such patented phenomenon: a neta without ideology, whisky without alcohol.
However, the hangover in the political cocktail that landed him in Tihar jail seems to be dissipating as he strategises his big comeback. He has placed Atishi as his trusted timeshare trainee in the CM’s chair and scrambled back on ye olde platform: an underdog as the top dog. He is back with a bark and a bite, with aggression directed at Narendra Modi and the Congress. Hatred unites with irony—both Modi and Kejrwial are the lone mass mobilisers and vote catchers for their parties.
Kejriwal’s political quest after finding Anna Hazare was to find himself. He obviously liked what he found, because there wasn’t anything else there except Kejriwal. The histrionically high octaves about victimhood, the unfurling of the besmirched flag of uprightness, and donning the cap of the neo freedom fighter with an anagram. He took it all, every conscience-cliché, political meme and historical pastiche and wove it all into one ballot basket—the messiah whose welfarism was but an Indira Gandhi trope.
No talk of making Delhi a multi-trillion economy. No chatter about AI and technology. Kejriwal uses the exhortation of self identity by seeking a mass covenant of rhetorical legerdemain: choose a leader who lives, eats, breathes and dresses like you. Choose one of you, for you. After the new genre of Modi hhakts made landfall in 2014, Kejriwallahs are a new class of electors who cut across castes and communities. It is an army of Kejriwallahs who trounced the Modi machine in the last two assembly elections in Delhi and one in Punjab.
As isms go, Kejri-sm is the ideology of pot-pourri populism. No definite contours like for Gandhism, Marxism, socialism or capitalism. Kejriwal is perhaps the first Indian leader who formed a party of rookies who bayed for change and a government that delivers, and won. Kejrinama is about free power and water, affordable mass healthcare and a world-class public education infrastructure. His model of freebies has become an essential part of all political parties’ manifestos.
On the religious front, he is a staunch Hindu who regularly visits Hanuman temples, even as he flaunts the secular Hindu badge. AAP-ites, a phalanx of volunteers he sowed like dragon’s teeth in the shortest possible time, are found in abundance in slums, jhuggi clusters and minority ghettoes across Delhi. But what makes them different from the traditional BJP and Congress voters is their feeling of being betrayed by the traditional national parties. Since their primary urban habitat is the slum with sub-standard civic amenities and poor healthcare, they look for better public services, and affordable water, electricity and medicare. As with all historical populist movements, their leadership is young and comparatively elitist; Rhodes scholars brought up in an urban environment. AAP’s maximum support in terms of talent and resources came from overseas during its initial years.
It is said that prison tests a man, and Kejriwal passed the test. He is attempting to transcend himself—to be a supra-Kejriwal who won’t limit himself to plundering the fruits of a mere assembly election, but to catapult himself beyond the borders of just chief ministerial power into a national alternative game park in a personality-driven Lok Sabha election. For the past 12 years, his calculated obsession has been to accrue hyper-visibility by grabbing headlines and influencing the national narrative. From 2014 to 2018, Modi was his chosen target; he called him a psychopath. He pitched himself as dream seller. He expanded his footprint after creating history in Delhi by bagging around 55 percent votes and winning 67 out of the 70 assembly seats, and reaching out to states where his shadow had fallen, but not his footstep.
He figured the time had come to test his popularity and acceptability outside his pasture. In 10 years, AAP contested assembly and civic elections in 15 states including Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and some Northeastern states. It didn’t open an account in most of them. But Kejriwal had made his point: ‘You can beat me, but you can’t ignore me.’
Punjab was an atavism of Delhi: in 2022, it created the electoral record of a newbie ousting a Congress-led government by winning 92 of the 117 seats and pushed the Akalis and BJP into oblivion. AAP is the only opposition party other than the Congress that governs two states and controls two civic bodies.
Kejriwal’s primary objective of making AAP a national party was achieved in 2023, a feat no other party started by a local leader has accomplished since independence. AAP, like other small parties, doesn’t have geographically demarcated fiefdoms. The difference is that many other regional outfits helmed by giants and divas couldn’t reach the next level. Meanwhile, the much-maligned opinion polls rank Kejriwal the third most popular leader after Modi and Rahul Gandhi.
Even after over a decade, the key to unlocking the secret of Kejri charisma can’t be found. The AAP boss told an interviewer: "We are common men. If we find our solution in the left, we are happy to borrow it from there. If we find our solution in the right, we are happy to borrow it from there. Kejriwal has put forward three pillars of AAP's core ideology: staunch patriotism, staunch honesty and humanity.” Into this concrete, he has mixed in liberal aspirations like demanding scrapping Section 377 of the penal code and legalising same-sex marriage.
Kejriwal knows the road to the top is a traffic jam of ambitions. Hence, he has ensured that his bandwagon, with its discrete identity and iteration, is hitting the national electoral highway coupled with the INDIA omnibus, so that he is positioned close to the driver’s seat. He has captured the political space vacated by the Congress in Delhi and Punjab. He is a threat to many regional parties. Kejriwal can be understood only as a binary phenomenon: a pragmatic administrator and a disruptionist rabble rouser. His voters and supporters want better public services, while he wants to better his national equity.
Keeping voters’ trust would mean “a politics that eschews grand abstractions and vague promises” and “instead focuses on the things that really matter”. In Kejriwal’s style of identity politics, the three things that really matter other than neo socialism are Kejriwal, Kejriwalism and Kekjriwallas.
prabhu chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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