Kejriwal in delhi polls

By Prem Chandran

UPDATED: JAN 21, 2015:

The battle lines are drawn in Delhi for the assembly polls with AAP's Arvind Kejriwal and the BJP's new-found leader Kiran Bedi taking up positions, whipping up the public mood, while the Congress and its campaign chief Ajit Maken have fallen by the wayside. Neither the public nor the media seems taking a serious note of the Congress presence in this polls. There is a perceptible shift in public mood in favour of Kejriwal, and the internal bickerings in the BJP over "importing leaders from outside" and giving tickets at the expense of its own leaders have sullied its image already. This discontentment is bound to work to the disadvantage of the BJP, while the latest round of opinion polls have put AAP and Kejriwal a shade above BJP. This has come as pleasant surprise even to the Kejriwal camp. Also, feelings are strengthening that Delhi will prove to be Amit Shah's Waterloo.

Despite the media hype, it looks like there are not many who are euphoric about the invention of Bedi by the BJP. If Shanti Bhushan tried to make up for this with an energetic espousal of her candidature and a punch on Kejriwal's back, it was only to have been expected. She would require very many Bhushans to back her cause now. This is more so, as she is pitting herself against a leader like Kejriwal. This is not to argue that Kejriwal has already won this elections. But, as of now, there is a revival of his fortunes, but how the resourceful Amit Shah and Co plan to turn the tide in their favour is worth watching.

The present dissensions in the BJP cannot be dismissed as a storm in a tea cup; but chances are also that the party would overcome this handicap. The AAP is seriously handicapped by lack of funds. Rumours are doing the rounds that the Ambanis too are keen on ensuring Kejriwal's defeat and have started playing a role in the polls. Much of the initial assertions about Bedi winning the support of the women in this polls have already vanished into the thin air. For Delhi's women as a whole, there are issues beyond the safety and security in public life, an issue that has been hyped by certain segments of the society. Bedi herself is cautiously optimistic about her chances. She is reticent about a face-off with Kejriwal. Indication that her confidence levels remain low. There are assessments this polls is not going to be a cakewalk for her in Krishna Nagar, a traditional BJP bastion.

Kiran Bedi still has her strengths, but how far can these strengths take her? Skeletons have already begun tumbling out of her cupboard, and there are those who look at her lateral entry into the BJP politics with skepticism. This, despite the initial media euphoria over her likely chiefministership. Reports have it that the RSS has endorsed her name for the CM post, but the fact remains that she has to cover a lot of ground before being anointed as the one who would govern Delhi from the front, if at all it happens. She lacks the political credentials; she lacks the personal credentials as well. The row she created while in Mizoram, a la the MBBS admission for her daughter in Delhi under a Mizoram quota is not lost sight of; nor her flip-flops about Narendra Modi. She praises Modi now, but her fascination for Modi started, if it did, after he became the PM. She was increasingly seen edging closer to the BJP as the party's graph began being on the ascendant. Public memory is short, but not too short.

How do you trust someone who lacks the credentials? And, how do you trust someone who is seen as a weathercock in public life? The RSS has no business endorsing names for political postings. In the minimum, it should stop giving the impression that it runs the government from behind. It need not. In matters of credibility, Arvind Kejriwal stands head and shoulders above Bedi, though on the governance front his activism took him a bit far as was evident in the writing off of the electricity and water cess by a single stroke of his pen. The activist was at work; no one saw a personal interest in it. Kejriwal's commitment to the cause is not quesstioned. On the other hand, Bedi's is suspect. This is important, as the Delhi elections are sought to be fought now on a personal level -- between the activist and the 'usurper'.

The fact of the matter is that, Kejriwal's failings apart, the Modi wave had swept him aside. Success is a heady potion; and no one wants to be on the side of failure. So with Modi and Kejriwal. Kejriwal, despite his failures, has time on his side. He can wait and plan his future – a future when Narendra Modi’s fortunes reverse. This Delhi elections will show whether there is still fire in Kejriwal’s belly, or this still is disaster time for him. The BJP is bound to work hard and try to get enough to form the next government. The reverse scenario, as one looks at it, is a government headed by Kejriwal and backed by the Congress. That, though, can be recipe for trouble. It is too early to say whether Kejriwal on his own will muster enough of the seats to form a government of his own; chances are also that the Bedi factor works to his added advantage.

Kejriwal’s interests are diametrically opposite to the interests of the Congress party, though both speak for the cause of the poor and the minorities. For the Congress, it always represented the interests of the elitist segments of the society but never tired itself of speaking for all the vote banks – the poor, the minorities, the dailits. Kejriwal’s heart is with the ordinary masses. A Sheila Dikshit or Ajay Maken, or a Sonia Gandhi, would not be comfortable with what he seeks to do at the head of a government. Their social mores, per se, are different. Kejriwal's activism will undercut the tree on which such worthies are perched. They will find other excuses and upset the Kejriwal applecart sooner or later as had happened in the past, not just with Kejriwal’s government, but with others too.

For the Congress party, inclusiveness meant being nice to all, keeping everyone happy. It meant creating vote banks out of the poor, the minorities, the dalits. The Food Security Scheme, or the subsidized rice scheme, was no more than a mechanism devised by Sonia Gandhi’s rootless, faceless bunch of second line party leaders to perpetrate the family rule for time immemorial. Unlike the food-for-work scheme that helped create assets for the nation, the food security scheme ignored the interests of the nation. Those who get rice so cheap – half a day’s work would fetch them ration for a week’s family existence – are bound to turn lazy and sit back at home scratching their limbs. But, those who came up with the scheme proved themselves to be clever by half. Despite the food security scheme, Narendra Modi came from behind and stole the political thunder from the Congress party.

Social change is not easy to come by. There has to be a world beyond subsidized rations. The flip side of such schemes is also that other social welfare sectors suffered. Nehru’s socialism envisaged free medical care. Government hospitals dispensed with care, treatment and medicines free of cost. Now, governments are ignoring such sectors, and look at easier ways to please the poor and get their votes. Faced with ailments, the poor have no option other than die a premature death. Public health centres are largely dysfunctional. There are hardly any medicines. Government schools used to provide good education. Now, funds are hard to come by for such sectors, and education for the poor has become a farce. Where will India, or any nation other than an oil kingdom, find the money to feed and educate its population free of cost?

Narendra Modi now speaks for the poor. And, he speaks up for the national causes. But, how far will he go? India’s national wealth is being looted right and left by vested interests across the board. This is not just limited to the mining barons or corporate interests. India’s left, bereft of a credible leadership, is virtually voiceless. There is no one to take on the vested interests that plague this nation. People are losing faith in the judiciary. Agencies like the vigilance and anti-corruption bureau are among India’s most corrupt. Politicians have a finger in every pie; and more so under the (former) Sonia Raj. How Modi shapes the future for India is worth watching. After all, how long should the self-seeking political bandicoots be allowed to keep the nation and its people fooling?

When the likes of Arvind Kejriwal and Anna Hazare came on to the public platform, and Kejriwal eventually formed a political party, feelings were that this would herald a change in the nation’s political culture vitiated by corruption, nepotism and hypocrisy, and help cleanse public life. In fact, today, cleaning the public life is more important than cleaning the Ganges. So much filth has accumulated over India’s body politic, thanks to the freewheeling politics practised mainly by the Congress party but not excluding many a regional entity, especially in recent decades, when self-seeking marauders swarmed politics for power and pelf. Any wonder then that the Congress party does not have a single face that carries conviction to be projected before the people?

While Modi took the middle class segment with him, Arvind Kejriwal is seen today as one who can fill the vacuum left behind by the left, the Communists – that has been taken to cleaners by a set of leaders heading the two parties and indulging in nothing more than ideological tongue-twisting and providing, at best, shades of intellectual smartness, copying the theoretical Harold Laski push from London several decades ago. Closet communists, that’s those who have no touch with the common man, survive by the sound bites they get from the English electronic media. Kejriwal’s strength, by contrast, is his sincerity of purpose and hands-on approach to the problems of the common man. The ways he adopted in politics were however reckoned to be wrong – like his surfacing in Varanasi, when he was needed most in his own turf in Delhi and lead from the front when the General Elections came. That happened likely due to a wrong assessment of the support he thought he had across the country. Putting up 400 candidates through states south and north, west and east, was a misadventure by itself. Modi captured India by first capturing his own base, Gujarat, and making a kill out of it.

Delhi has a great mix of people. What was once the fiefdom of the Punjabis doing business and bureaucrats pulling the government strings, has undergone a demographic shift. There are the large numbers of South Indians, the young and educated people from the North-East, a sizeable Muslim population, large swarms from the backyards of Uttar Pradesh, and those from every state in numbers small and big. Large chunks of educated people from West Bengal, Orissa and Bihar have made Delhi their home. Interests mix. Out of this strange mosaic would emerge the next electoral verdict. Whether Kejriwal and his party make a success out of the upcoming elections is a moot point. If they fail too, a long road lies ahead for them. Feelings are rife that he and his Aam Aadmi Party would, for long term, do well to push a two-pronged agenda: push for the cause of the poor of this nation and work in ways as to cleanse public life. An electoral success or failure should, per se, not be the end al and et al of public life.

Kejriwal should rather be at the centre of India’s left, but keeping the hypocritical communists at an arm’s length. Allying with them will only discredit him. A Prakash Karat might give way to a new leader soon, but what's in the offing is no better an alternative. Can someone who cannot move an inch in his own state move the feathers of a nation, leave alone ruffle it? The Communists' unsolicited support to the AAP in the last polls in Delhi did not make a difference for Kejriwal or his party. Nor will it in future. He is not at the mercy of the so-called left. He has an aura of his own, and he is hoped to be what the Left here is in future, eventually creating a force that can take on the vested interests of this nation, and in the process carrying his aura beyond the fight against corruption. premcee@gmail.com www.indiahereandnow.com