Will Kejriwal address the elephant in the room? 

The Delhi HC, hearing a petition by Rashtriya Mukti Morcha that sought scrapping of the appointments of the Delhi MLAs for being “unconstitutional, illegal and without jurisdiction”, said in September 2016: “The specific plea of the petitioner [NGO] that the impugned order dated March 13, 2015, was passed without communicating the decision to the Lieutenant Governor for his views/concurrence has not been disputed by the Respondents (Delhi government).

Therefore, we find force in the submission of the petitioner that the issue is squarely covered by the decision [of the HC passed on August 4]. Accordingly, without going into the other contentions raised in the writ petition, the impugned order dated March 13, 2015, is hereby set aside.” Things have come very far in a matter of 15 months. Now on the recommendation of the Election Commission, the President has approved disqualification of the Aam Aadmi Party MLAs. Delhi government has again challenged this in the HC. A debate is being raged on the legality and legitimacy of disqualification. Public opinion is sharply divided on this issue.

But no one is asking questions that relate to the original petition by Rashtriya Mukti Morcha (RMM) and the decision of the AAP/Delhi government in this respect to challenge it on the very face of it. This becomes important considering that this NGO was founded by the same Ram Jethmalani who was hired by Kejriwal to represent him against Arun Jaitley in the defamation case. It is an entirely different fact that Jethmalani had parted from this NGO as its founder president in 1989 but a look at the history of cases fought by this NGO reveals its political character and affiliations. Without going into details, just a cursory look at an interview of advocate Ravinder Kumar, the National President of RMM published in Livemint on April 30, 2007, is extremeky insightful in understanding the ideological connections of AAP and RMM.

Apart the cases took up by RMM against Sonia Gandhi (foreign origin issue) and the the Prime Minister of India PV Narasimha Rao (in Jharkhand Mukti Morcha bribing case in which RMM was responsible for his first conviction) clearly shows who is getting benefitted politically. Although Kumar openly pronounces his equal disgust for Congress and BJP. In the interview, he says, “All of them are equally hypocritical and live off each other. Both the Congress and the BJP get a chance to rule by turns because of negative voting against the party in power. This indicates how the disgusted and frustrated voters are always seeking a change”.

This was the basic premise upon which AAP party had started its political journey and held itself as an alternative to the BJP-Congress diarchy. There may be a dozen questions on Arvind Kejriwal in this regard. How come a like-minded and anti-Congress antiBJP outfit petition against his MLAs? Why did he choose the founder President of RMM as his lawyer? Why he did not dispute the “specific plea of the petitioner (NGO)”, as mentioned in HC order? He has repeatedly alleged central government and LG of Delhi for not letting his mandated government work smoothly. Why did he not take the name of RMM, the original petitioner in office of profit case, once? Is this some sort of marriage of convenience? What about his colleagues? Operation Lotus Bloom It was a chilled morning in Delhi when I visited BJP’s state unit office exactly a year back. It was around 9.00 am and the office was still locked.

Nothing could be spotted except some empty red chairs in the lawn. Hardly a month had passed when Manoj Tiwari was appointed as Delhi BJP chief. The state unit office seemed disoriented then. AAP was struggling with office of profit case as Delhi HC had set aside appointment of 21 MLA’s in September 2016. This ruling had instilled a fresh energy in BJP cadre and they were expecting some sort of coup sooner or later. I had an appointment fixed with a senior BJP functionary who had worked for years with anticorruption movement and had been instrumental in convincing Anna Hazare to lead India Against Corruption launched by Arvind Kejriwal. He had joined BJP after a sense of deep disillusionment and betrayal in AAP. He came late, greeted, apologised and seemed afresh with some new plans as he opened his advocate’s briefcase and started discussing legal cases against AAP. That was the first instance I chanced upon a phrase “Operation Lotus Bloom”.

We heard this phrase very recently during Gujarat elections when Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked of it at a Kutch rally. Today, when this AAPBJP turf war has resumed after a brief hiatus it needs to be told that “Operation Lotus Bloom” was meticulously planned to ouster AAP government from Delhi way back in 2016. It is still very much in place. It all started with a PIL filed by NGO Rashtriya Mukti Morcha against appointment of 21 AAP MLAs as parliamentary secretaries and turned into a political battle with a defamation case filed by union minister Arun Jaitley against Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal for which Kejriwal hired senior lawyer Ram Jethmalani. The Ram Jethmalani episode of mid-2017 is still a mystery for many. Did he backoff or did Kejriwal remove him? What was the issue related to his professional fee that run into crores? Why did Jethmalani drop a letter bomb on Kejriwal and copy it to Jaitley? Was Kejriwal taken into some sort of trap by Jethmalani? Did Kejriwal chose Jethmalani to kill two birds with one stone and eventually failed? Does this episode relate to the recent happenings in AAP?

The Rajya Sabha Drama It was shocking for everyone to hear two unknown names for Rajya Sabha nomination from AAP. The furore over nomination of Gupta duo in Rajya Sabha complemented with the concern for Ashutosh, journalist turned AAP leader. Sanjay Singh as a natural choice for Rajya Sabha. Ashutosh was expectedly the best among rest. Social media was flooded with wishes for Ashutosh and questions as to why he was dropped when the final names were made public. It was not that his name was dropped or not chosen, rather something sinister was conspiring within close circles of Kejriwal. Ashutosh was continously opposing the candidature of Sushil Gupta in PAC meetings. He was adamant till the last moment that sending Gupta in Rajya Sabha was unethical; a man who had resigned from Congress just a month back and told Ajay Maken in advance that AAP has promised him a RS seat. When Kejriwal did not relent, Ashutosh asked that his dissent be made public.

This was the last pressor from Ashutosh. It was done the same day on national telivision when AAP spokesperson revealed that the decision of sending Suhil Gupta was passed by 8-1 vote. Ashutosh was left alienated and embarrassed in PAC and the party. This has happened umpteen times in AAP. The ouster of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan was the ugliest episode that this nation witnessed in open. It is still unclear why Kejriwal chose Shushil Gupta for the Rajya Sabha. Again the same question arises- what about his colleagues? What about internal democracy? Is this party run on a diktat from the chief?

Suicide of a Mandate Getting a huge mandate is second to holding it. Once you get a mandate to rule, you need to create and stick on to a perceptional vote. AAP is fast losing this perception war against its rivals, be it BJP or Congress. The main reason behind this is the centrality of internal power structure that lies with Arvind Kejriwal. It would make an interesting analogy with the BJP where none is visible other than Prime Minister Modi himself. Here we have a Gujarat model of governance unleashed in the Centre where the cabinet and ranks become redundant.

There, we could see an emerging Delhi model of governance where Chief Minister is the man in power. You may, if you wish, compare Amit Shah with Manish Sisodia, both blue-eyed men of the King. This analogy would have been useful if AAP could have consolidated its organisational capacity and structure in the last one year when it strictly stuck to Delhi after wasting its resources and energy in Punjab and Goa. But alas it has failed! I am reminded of the two insightful articles — one by Yogendra Yadav and the other by Jawed Naqvi. In April 2017, Yadav had written a piece in a national daily where he said, “BJP is out to murder the Aam Aadmi Party but the Arvind Kejriwalled party will suicide before it gets murdered”. Around the same time Naqvi in his Dawn column titled “The anomalous rise of Mr Kejriwal” had concluded, “...in Kejriwal’s case when he loses, he wins”. Formulating the “anomalous”, he wrote, “The anomalous rise of Kejriwal persists with its perverse logic”. Today after a timeline of almost nine months in the reflection of Rajya Sabha episode and MLAs disqualification, we could easily verify who was correct. It is true that BJP is still out to sabotage AAP but Kejriwal is himself fast losing many dear comrades just due to his whims and fancies. Ashutosh is a case in point. He was never a B-team and would never be. He had the capacity to stand up to the communal and divisive politics of BJP that is leading this nation to a constitutional disaster but he has not uttered a word on the ongoing injustices. It is true that he has worked a lot on health and education in Delhi but he has failed to build a party. The moment he entered into electoral politics, the movement was lost. Now it is not possible for him to take to streets again.

A more convincing signal that Kejriwal style of politics is in its last moments could be seen in the rise of the political youth across the country, be it Jignesh Mewani, Chandrashekhar Ravan, Hardik Patel, Kanhaiya Kumar, Akhil Gogoi, Shehla Rashid and many others. This new lot have one thing in common- they are secular, progressive as well as anti-Brahmanism and pro-Dalit. The ideology that Kejriwal and his IAC had nurtured has now become obsolete in contemporary political discourse just due to a single factor, as one foreign analyst had aptly put way back in 2013: “The elephant in the room is racism”! Time is running out. We can only wish if Arvind Kejriwal could consider rearranging his “room”.