Thank you, Raghav Chadha
Dear Raghav,
When I first learnt that you had parted company with Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and had joined Amit Shah’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), my instant reaction was: Et tu, Brutus. On calmer reflection, I am inclined to say: Thank You, Raghav.
Thank you for applying the final closure to one of the most exciting as well as most diabolical tricks that was played on our collective innocence in post-Independent India. From Jantar Mantar to Ashoka Road/Deen Dayal Upadhaya Marg is a short distance but it is a politically long journey you have made. There is no doubt it must have been an agonising decision to climb aboard Modi’s leaking ship; but it was the only choice, in fact, a very natural choice, before you.
I remember meeting you nearly a decade ago in Chandigarh when you were trying to implant the AAP flag in Punjab. I was struck by your idealism and – pardon me – by your naivety. You were so obviously an intelligent man yet failed to grasp the basic contradiction between the Idea of AAP and Kejriwal’s AAP. The Idea of AAP was premised on a notion, a faith, a hope that it was possible to excise parliamentary politics of its abundant impurities. Kejriwal’s AAP was – and remains – a project that seeks to pursue bourgeois politics, with its inherently unsatisfactory outcomes. AAP never had a revolutionary purpose.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
The primary reason the idea of AAP got destroyed by the Kejriwal mob is that the very birth of AAP was baptised in the dirty waters of the so-called Ana Hazare movement.
No doubt, the Anna Hazare movement was a shining, even if only a fleeting, moment of moral intensity. It pretended to stand for an ethical polity, mobilising our middle classes’ sensibilities, marshalling resentments over the notional but monumental corruption invented by Vinod Rai as Comptroller and Auditor General, and selling the idea that an honest leader alone was enough to make our dishonest democracy honest.
Behind the scenes of the Anna Hazare protest, vested corporate interests provided the ‘resources’ to finance the Ram Leela ground spectacle. Talented but ambitious men and women provided the “narrative”. And, a Jhandewalan-based natak company provided the extras who filled the maidan. It was an imaginatively crafted show. Instant box-office success.
Undoubtedly, the Anna Hazare movement was a therapeutic moment. India’s excitable civil society felt energised that its collective voice was at last poised to purge the polity of its impurities and its corrupt values. The neatly choreographed Anna Hazare dharna at Raj Ghat on Independence Day was a clever invocation of our unconscious hankering for a whiff of Gandhian wholesomeness. It was a day we felt we were entitled to a modicum of decency in our public life; and, we silently thanked our gods for sending us that man with the Gandhi cap. We suspended our judgment and were willing to learn economics from bogus godmen, who pretended to have the statistical heft to calculate the amount of black money stashed abroad.
The underrated Manmohan Singh regime gave the “movement” a long rope and denied its strategists the halo of martyrdom. Since the movement was never meant to be a revolutionary enterprise, it was only a matter of time before the explosion of conflicting ambitions and clashing egos took place. The first tranche of defectors, led by Kiran Bedi, switched over to the puppeteers’ saffron corner.
The saffron strategists helped Kejriwal set up his AAP show. The immediate requirement for them was to find a voice who would smack-talk the Congress leadership, degrade the Congress brand, and, by default, build up the BJP as the antithesis of a corrupt and dynastic political party. The BJP echo system also fed Kejriwal’s megalomanic ambitions to suggest he and he alone – and, not Rahul Gandhi – was entitled naturally to the mantle of leadership of the youth. [I won’t be surprised if the saffron seducers have held out the same bright, shining future for you, once you become a card-carrying sevak.]
The saffron strategists were prescient enough to realise that Kejriwal could never be a challenge to a national party like the BJP. The AAP got reduced, at the end of day, to a civic forum. Local grievances, neighbourhood safety, community schools are all important concerns in themselves; but a national party has to have a national outlook in order to emerge as a national alternative.
It is no surprise that Kejriwal and the rest of AAP’s leadership was never – perhaps by design – able to produce a slate of prescriptions and proscriptions for our national ambitions and our collective dreams. In particular, the AAP leadership failed the test of clarity and trustworthiness in matters of coping when communal riots erupted in the national capital in 2020. Kejriwal never positioned himself as a champion of a fair and firm secular order – notwithstanding all those flirtations with sunderkand and Hanumanchallisa recitals. And, that suited the Jhandewalan theater company-wallahas well.
Dear Raghav, all of these calculations and all of this cunning should not be a surprise to you. You were very much in the inner circle; probably you had doubts about all this insincerity but chose to hold your tongue. Perhaps.
Still, a thank you note is due for forcing us to remind ourselves of our own gullibility as a nation that we allowed ourselves to be taken in by the Anna Hazare bogusness. That you feel comfortable in saffron company is your business; but you have underscored the brutal reality that there is no place for an AAP like entity in the national scheme of things. Kejriwal performed his part of the script: helping craft layers and layers of respectability for Narendra Modi and other Jhandewalan apparatchiks. May you be blessed with long and fruitful years in the service of Mother India. Vande, Vande.
Harish Khare was editor-in-chief of The Tribune.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
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