Arvind Alone Party in Delhi

New AAP: The Aam Aadmi Party's new avatar in 49 days in power in the Union capital

The country is currently witnessing an unbelievable metamorphosis of Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party. In his 49-day first tenure as Delhi chief minister over a year ago, Kejriwal had got stuck in the mass agitation track of Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement. Just as he completed the first 49 days of his second innings as CM, what we are witnessing is a completely different avatar of Kejriwal.

 There is nothing aam aadmi about Kejriwal’s second government. His ministry is packed with acolytes and he has designated the closest of them, Manish Sisodia, as deputy CM. When loyalty is the factor for rewards, there is no place for fair representation. He hasn’t bothered to have a woman representative in the ministry. There is no real commitment to simplicity, which is a basic article of faith of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

Ministers are free to settle down in government accommodations of their choice and convenience. They are not really required to travel like aam aadmis: they are free to use official vehicles, and perhaps, in due course, with that status symbol laal batti atop their vehicles. They are allowed to take security cover, though advised not to go overboard.

Kejriwal has found that the statutory six-minister restriction (excluding chief minister) on the size of the Delhi ministry is an impediment to good governance. Like CMs elsewhere who often find it expedient to circumvent the constitutional restriction on the ministry size, Kejriwal too has resorted to appointing his legislators as parliamentary secretaries. He has decided to appoint as many as 21 legislators as parliamentary secretaries.

History, however, tells us that these are but ways of accommodating more legislators in the government to ensure loyalty and stability of the political regime. Kejriwal enjoys a brute majority of 67 members in the 70-member Delhi Legislative Assembly. Though the overwhelming numbers would more than assure a comfortable full five-year term in office for the AAP government, history tells us that the numbers alone will not guarantee stability. Kejriwal can therefore be expected to face the challenge of fulfilling his legislators’ political ambitions. Obviously, he appears to be more sensitive to their aspirations as they alone can assure his grip over power.

That brings us to the other, more pronounced spectacle of these past weeks in the AAP’s organisational front. In a shocking display of cold-blooded purge, Kejriwal removed two tallest co-founders of the party – Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav - from all positions of responsibility and authority in AAP organisation. Their fault? They questioned him on various aspects of running the party in the run-up to the Delhi assembly elections.

Bhushan is the leader who has helped give the party the cutting-edge anti-corruption plank through his well-publicised public interest litigations and press conferences from the AAP platform. Whereas Yadav, using his socialist background and contacts with social movements and mass agitation groups in the country, helped ensure a wider appeal for the party. Probably, people like Admiral (retd) Ramdas and Medha Patkar would not have identified themselves with the party but for people like Yadav, who has also been the most articulate spokesperson for the party and widely acknowledged as its ideologue.
 
Neither Bhushan nor Yadav ever projected themselves as a rival candidate for Kejriwal’s chief ministerial job. But being party elders and from a mass agitation background, who shared with Kejriwal the idealisms of transparency, simplicity, accountability and collective leadership as the defining features of the new party they launched, they could certainly be expected to question the functioning of the party and their Delhi government from time to time. They could be also expected to persist with anti-corruption advocacy, question the so-called crony capitalism with high profile attacks on big businesses, and toe a pro-poor line of thinking and action.

But now as the CM with a brute majority, Kejriwal has travelled a long distance from the agitational politics era of not too distant a past to a new phase of power politics. Assured of the legislative numbers to back free exercise of political power, Kejriwal perceives that this freedom will be severely restricted by men like Bhushan, Yadav and Ramdas and shackled by the party rules, regulations and institutions created at the time of the party’s founding.

Kejriwal and his acolytes invoked charges of indiscipline against the duo and got them shunted out of the party’s highest decision-making body – the national executive. The party rules require that the charges are referred to the party’s internal Lokpal, Ramdas. But Kejriwal and Co did not trust the Lokpal to do their bidding and simply bypassed the laid-down procedure while showing the door to the rebels. In fact, Kejriwal did not even spare the Lokpal. He too was shunted out on the cooked-up plea that his term had ended. There was a certain brazenness about these actions as it stunned the very people who had invested their commitment, time and resources to launch a party that was rooted in, to some extent, idealism.

Kejri’s authoritarian ways

Kejriwal was prepared for the consequence at the national level and in the states where it has orgnisational presence. Those disillusioned with Kejriwal’s authoritarian ways have moved out. He is ready for these. With his focus on Delhi, it doesn’t appear that he will focus on other states for now. Indeed, it was he who had rejected proposals from Bhushan and Yadav to contest last November’s assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana, the two states where the party had pinned hopes ahead of the last year’s Lok Sabha elections.

The realist Kejriwal is now like any other average Indian politician, who is loath to democratic consultations with room for divergent voices and prone to concentrate power and authority in one man. Bhushan and Yadav may be wondering now how prophetic Hazare was when he advised them and Kejriwal against entering the “dirty” world of politics. But at that time itself, Kejriwal had no hesitation to dismiss his mentor’s advice against forming a new party. With the purge, Kejriwal has ensured those in positions of power in the Delhi ministry will also control the party organisation, with him as the sole supremo in both the government and the party.

This may not be good news for the Delhi voters who gave the APP such a huge mandate. For, a transformed Kejriwal may not deliver on many of the populist poll promises, though the political realist in him will blame all on the Modi government at the Centre and the BJP-led municipal corporations in the national capital. Kejriwal’s realpolitik approach may as well be: “Let’s divide and rule Delhi.”

The recent crisis in the Aam Aadmi Party ending in the purge of two senior leaders indicates that the fledgling organisation cares little for ideology, internal democracy or transparency, virtually its founding principles when it was formed not too long ago. Within weeks of storming back to power with an unbelievable 67 seats out of 70 in Delhi, the organisation is sounding like an average party without its lofty ideals and promises.