The mystique of Arvind Kejriwal’s politics was manifested yet again in the inexplicable irony of diehard secular activists feeling relieved at the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s defeat in Delhi. They are not celebrating the BJP’s victory, but they quietly prayed for Kejriwal getting cut down to size fearing his emergence as the key player in the opposition camp by winning the third consecutive term in the nation’s capital.
This irony is born out of Kejriwal’s mysterious politics.
There are countless reasons for the inherent distrust. He built a campaign against corruption with secret support from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and corporations, but went on to project himself as anti-BJP.
He presented the Lokpal as a panacea for corruption but abandoned this instrument after grabbing power.
He tried to weave a public image of a “kattar imaandar”, but most of his senior ministers kept getting embroiled in corruption cases.
He started as an “aam aadmi” wearing simple clothes and driving a small car, but ended up in a “sheesh mahal”, himself tearing apart the clean-politics narrative that drew in the masses that yearned for new politics.
The most disturbing aspect of his politics was lack of ideological clarity. While there are videos showing him bragging about his family’s RSS connection, he publicly demonstrated that he accepts their authority by writing to Mohan Bhagwat about Narendra Modi’s misdeeds. In that letter, he carefully chose not to question the RSS worldview and its communal agenda.
Riots in 2020 completely exposed his duplicity; he kept aloof as Delhi burnt. His stand on issues like the internationally famous anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protests at Shaheen Bagh and the controversial farm laws triggered widespread concern.
The less said the better about his discomfort with secular colleagues like Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, and the overlap of his support base with the BJP, as voters alternated between the AAP and Modi in Lok Sabha and assembly elections.
The perception that as the AAP has polled a 43.57% vote – barely 2% less than the BJP – it would be wrong to presume a rout, is wholly erroneous. A large number of people voted for the AAP despite strong antipathy towards Kejriwal’s politics only because they didn’t want to support the BJP and because the Congress was a mere spectator in the election.
Also read: AAP’s Unwillingness to Go with Congress May Have Cost them Delhi
The results in constituencies dominated by Muslims and Dalits bear this out. Both these communities had developed a serious interest in Congress leader Rahul Gandhi but voted for the AAP with the sole intent of defeating the BJP.
It won’t be a miscalculation if 20% is subtracted from the AAP’s vote-share because its real support base, the one that still believes in its politics, does not constitute more than 20-25% of the vote.
Muslims voted for the AAP despite wounding anguish over Kejriwal’s inaction in the Delhi riots. This vote will doubtless shift to the Congress as and when the self-destructive party wakes up.
It is absolutely fallacious to judge the AAP on the basis of its current vote share. Kejriwal will soon discover how difficult it is to protect the party without power and the propaganda machinery of the government. The Delhi result will have its repercussions in Punjab and for the AAP’s national expansion plans.
If Kejriwal sharpens his ideological positioning against the RSS, Modi-Shah will not spare him. If he persists with his ideological vacillations, his position in the opposition camp will be weakened. And any attempt to blame the Congress for his defeat and gain sympathy in the INDIA bloc will be untenable because the numbers do not support that theory.
While Kejriwal made no efforts to strike an alliance with the Congress, declaring at the very outset that he would go it alone, the AAP swept the 2015 election despite the Congress getting 9.7% of the vote and repeated its stunning performance in 2020, when the Congress polled 4.26% of the vote.
The Congress has barely managed to get an additional 2% of the vote this time, while the AAP’s share has slumped by around 10 percentage points. To curse the Congress for its defeat is a pathetic excuse even as the political narrative would have drastically changed had Kejriwal anticipated the fall in his popularity and aligned with Rahul Gandhi.
But Kejriwal, like Mamata Banerjee, has leadership ambitions and he went alone thinking that he would be in a position to challenge Rahul Gandhi in the opposition camp after his victory.
The defeat is a direct consequence of Kejriwal’s miscalculation. He miserably failed to foresee that the “kattar imaandar” narrative was in tatters. He presumed that every supporter would buy his vendetta theory and come out to take revenge against the BJP. His conceit egged him on to seek a referendum on himself; he told voters that he would become the chief minister again only if the people voted for him considering his unimpeachable honesty.
There was a section of voters who saw merit in the allegations of a scam in the state’s liquor policy. The ugly spectacle of so many senior leaders in jail created bad atmospherics. This sentiment was deepened by the quarrelsome rhetoric about the lieutenant general derailing the government’s welfare programmes.
Also read: An Open Letter to Arvind Kejriwal
People saw infrastructural deficiencies and the non-fulfilment of promises. The “sheesh mahal” controversy blotted Kejriwal’s personal image. The failure to clean Yamuna became a certificate of his duplicity. His reliance on religiosity and brazen aloofness in the Delhi riots gave credibility to the charges of his ideological infirmities.
All this had given the BJP an opening to enter his impregnable fortress.
AAP leaders had genuine complaints about the manipulation of the voter-list; cases of deletions and additions are indeed bewildering. But Kejriwal needs to look within if he wants to reinvent himself for future battles.
What is bigger than the electoral defeat is the crisis of credibility that he is grappling with. His one-time supporters now doubt his credentials. What a freelance journalist, Jitendra Kumar, wrote on polling day on X is a case in point:
“Mera maanana hai ki jis tarah lohe lohe ko kaatta hai, vish vish ko kaatta hai, dhurt dhurt ko chhakata hai, usi tarah shaatir hi shaatir ko katega. Neech hi neech ko kaatega. Mera vote jhadu ko!”
That sums up the people’s perception about Kejriwal’s political mystique. A senior journalist, a supporter of Kejriwal’s ‘clean politics’ rhetoric, voted for the AAP, thinking that Kejriwal’s dishonest and lowly tricks can prove to be an antidote to Modi’s dishonest and lowly ways.
The message for Kejriwal is clear – reform or perish!
Sanjay K. Jha is a political commentator.
