What goes around, comes around. It’s a lesson that former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal might have learned on Saturday.
The former Indian Revenue Service officer, with his muffler, sandals and holier-than-thou visage, was at the forefront of the so-called India Against Corruption (IAC) movement that eventually paved the way for Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister.
It also propelled Kejriwal into the chief minister’s chair. Accusing then chief minister Sheila Dikshit of corruption, he had promised to jail her once he came to power. He couldn’t – no allegation against her was proven.
Kejriwal and his friends in the IAC accused the Manmohan Singh government of a Rs 1.76 lakh crore scam in the allocation of 2G spectrum and branded it corrupt. The charges were thrown out in court, which said a huge scam was seen where there was none. By then, though, the government had been booted out.
Now, the boot is on the other foot.
It is Kejriwal’s turn to be scalded by corruption charges that he says are false, his fate sealed by a Dikshit – Sheila’s son Sandeep got around 4,500 votes, which is 500 more than the margin of defeat in the New Delhi constituency. This was not just a son’s sweet revenge, it was also a reversal of roles for the Congress that has in the past watched the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) eat into its votes in its straight battles with the BJP.
During one such fight, in Goa, when P. Chidambaram said the AAP would only divide the non-BJP vote in a Congress-BJP contest, Kejriwal had responded, “Sir, stop crying.”
Also read: An Open Letter to Arvind Kejriwal
Few would deny that the battle in the country now is an ideological one between an inclusive India and a Hindu Rashtra, and Kejriwal stands nowhere in it. He claims to fight the BJP and his party is in the opposition alliance, but he has been soft on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). When he opposed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), it was on grounds that it would increase unemployment in India and not because it discriminated against Muslims; he wanted the Shaheen Bagh sit-in to be cleared so that commuters would not be hassled; he supported the scrapping of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status under Article 370; he was found wanting when Delhi’s minorities needed the healing touch after the riots in 2020; his reticence on the demand for a caste census has been noticed; and his party’s government recently issued a circular demanding that schools prevent the admission of children of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.
“You can’t defeat the BJP holding the BJP’s tail,” political activist Yogendra Yadav, a co-founder of the AAP, who was later expelled, said after Saturday’s results.
The irony: the BJP comes to power on an anti-corruption plank. After the electoral bond revelations, the SEBI saga and the charges of bribery brought by the US department of justice against Gautam Adani, on whose aircraft Modi had arrived in New Delhi to become prime minister the first time. And after being accused of stealing the mandate in state after state through operation Lotus.
The spectre of a threat much graver than even the buying of elected MLAs hangs over the country now, with the Election Commission (EC) either unwilling or unable to give answers that would chase it away and reassure Indians.
Leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi last week placed before parliament figures that raise questions about the sanctity of the election process in Maharashtra. He followed this up with a joint press conference on the issue with allies Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party. Here is what they flagged:
- The number of adults in Maharashtra is 9.54 crore, according to the government of India’s data. The number of registered voters in the state is 9.7 crore.
Question: How can a state have more registered voters than people who are of voting age?
- In the five years between the 2019 Assembly election and the 2024 Lok Sabha election, 32 lakh new voters were added in Maharashtra. In the five months between the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the 2024 Assembly elections, 39 lakh new voters were added.
Question: How were more people added to the electoral rolls in five months than in five years? Why has this anomalous hike happened only in Maharashtra among seven states that went to the polls in 2023-24? Why is it the first time that this has happened even in Maharashtra?
Also read: AAP’s Unwillingness to Go with Congress May Have Cost them Delhi
“The nice way of saying it is that the Election Commission has lost control of the voter list. The bad way of saying it is that the Election Commission has manipulated the list,” Gandhi said, asking for the state’s complete voting lists to be shared with the opposition parties.
The opposition alliance had won 30 out of 48 seats in Maharashtra in the summer Lok Sabha elections. But in the Vidhan Sabha elections five months later, it won only 50 of the 288 seats.
The leader of the opposition said that the votes of the Congress, Shiv Sena and NCP had more or less remained unchanged between the two elections. But the votes of the BJP and its allies had gone up, suggesting that every one of the new voters had voted for them.
The EC has not shared voter lists so far, nor indicated that it will. It has only said it would give a written reply, which is still awaited. Its explanation in December for the increase in the number of voters talks about around 26 lakh first-time voters and is silent on the remaining 23 lakh voters. It does not say why Maharashtra alone saw this strange spike that is also a first for the state. Nor does it explain how there are more voters than there are adults in the state.
A separate, but interlinked, issue has been raised in court. Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi leader Prakash Ambedkar has challenged the Maharashtra assembly election in court on the ground that as many as 75 lakh votes were cast in the closing minutes and after the closing hours of polling but no record verifying the authenticity of the voters has been provided.
Until now, the accusation was that the BJP was engineering splits in rival parties to come to power in states where it had lost the election. Now, the fear being flagged is: Is the election itself safe? Are the results a true reflection of the people’s mandate?
The voters in one village in Maharashtra, Markadwadi, clearly believe they are not. They did not just voice their suspicion, but tried to act on it, pooling money to hold a repoll and verify the result. That effort was thwarted but the doubts persist.
Perhaps it is time for a real movement against corruption. Kejriwal has time on his hands now, and can rally his old friends again – Anna Hazare who retreated to his village once Modi became prime minister, Kiran Bedi who was installed as lieutenant governor by the Modi government and now leads a quieter life, and Ramdev who is busy with his business of ayurveda. Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, whom Kejriwal expelled from the party they had jointly founded, might find it hard to trust him again but would identify with the cause.
In his earlier avatar as a crusader against corruption, Kejriwal had declared publicly he would never enter politics or contest an election. When he did though, he was welcomed because he came as Everyman – the Aam Aadmi – a representative of the educated, hard working middle class and a friend of the poor. But what he came to embody in his journey from the blue WagonR to ‘Sheesh Mahal’ was the worst of what characterises large sections of the Indian middle class today – greed, cowardice and an unwillingness to look beyond self-interest.
This election result has given him the chance to make a fresh start and chase what he had once said was his dream: to work for a better India. Or he could simply pack his bags and head to Punjab to take the chief minister’s chair there.
Harshita Kalyan is a Calcutta-based journalist.
