JOIN USArvind Kejriwal uses Modi's manual to tackle PM
Is Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal using the impending Gujarat-Himachal Pradesh elections to position himself as the national answer to Narendra Modi?
Even as Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar did a Maharashtra on Narendra Modi's BJP and added insult to injury with a call to arms for the battle of 2024, Kejriwal too has opened up with staccato bursts of his own in Gujarat.
If Nitish is aware that the BJP eats allies for breakfast, Kejriwal now knows that munching on the Congress alone won't fetch him a five-star dinner in a downtown café. Going solo or switching mates, the patriarch of Patna has been there eight times and done it all over 22 years. Before eroding strength in his home, marks him out for oblivion outside, Nitish would like to encash his untainted image and national acceptability to stitch together an opposition answer to Narendra Modi in 2024. If you make it to the altar, it's a fitting finale, if not, you are still the priest who made it possible!
Kumar realises that if he has to helm a big ship, he must go where the water is deep, and so has Delhi in his long sight. Kejriwal is already in Delhi, even if heading a truncated empire, and must perforce fan out into the countryside for national markers if fledgling AAP wants fast adulthood.
While Modi's backroom manoeuvres leading up to his chief minister-ship in 2001 are little known outside, except in hardcore circles, his image as a go-getter, a development-oriented strategist is a marketing marvel that hides a shrewd mind mated with an aggression-filled demeanour and verbal callisthenics to match. Same as speech, strategically timed silence is also a weapon in his armoury though he mocked his predecessor-PM as 'Maun' Mohan Singh.
How times change. Now the AAP national convenor lifts not pages but chapters from the Modi manual to get back at him.
The Gujarat chief minister, who had donned the mantle of Hindu Hriday Samrat (Hindu heartthrob), switched saddle to development messiah via a three-day Sadbhavana fast in September 2011 when he developed national ambitions but fell back on the tried and tested 'Gujarat formula' of cleaving to conquer after becoming the PM in 2014. Unbridled aggression against the Congress was the hallmark of his campaigning. Novitiate Kejriwal began similarly against the BJP before time, trials and tribulations taught him the virtues of controlled aggression. There has been no looking back thereafter.
For Kejriwal, whose AAP came into being in 2012, both the BJP and the Congress were at the receiving end of his tongue lashing, but the initiating political lesson came when he had to fall back on the Congress to form his first government in Delhi in 2013 which collapsed within 48 days. What looked like brash aggression then and resembles political sagacity today had him contesting against Modi from Varanasi in 2014 and losing badly. Re-elected to head the Delhi government with a steamroller 67 out of 70 seat victory in 2015, Kejriwal eschewed confrontation with a needling Centre, putting in place a delivery model of basic services that not only brought him back to power in 2020 with a thumping majority(62 out of 70 seats) but established him as a performer. Punjab in the AAP kitty (92 of total 117 seats) in 2022 is the reward for the exemplary work in Delhi.
The Modi government may have staved off an immediate BJP-AAP electoral confrontation this May through the move to unify the three municipal corporations in Delhi(MCD), but no such compulsion dogs AAP in Gujarat. Words of work travel, and Kejriwal is cashing in on it.
Much water has flowed down both the Jamuna and the Sabarmati since 2018 when the Delhi Police raided chief minister Kejriwal's residence, and in March this year when saffron activists did so, seven of whom were subsequently arrested and feted by the local BJP unit on release. It rubbed home the realisation that AAP can no longer duck a straight fight. Prime Minister Modi's 'revadi' remarks provided just the opening Kejriwal needed to take the battle to the highest level in the BJP. "Those who were terming his welfare schemes as freebies were traitors to the country", the Delhi CM was quoted as saying on August 8, adding that an atmosphere is being created in the country against provisions of free education at government schools and free treatment at government hospitals. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman was quick to react, terming it a" perverse twist" to the debate on freebies with the Delhi chief minister attempting to create fear in the minds of the poor. In one fell swoop, Kejriwal has escalated the fight to the highest level and turned the action-reaction narrative on its head where he sets the agenda, answers it himself and leaves the opponent to react to it.
This is a page straight out of Modi's manual, watched by many of us, as it has unfolded innumerable times during his chief ministerial stint in Gujarat and thereafter in Delhi. An example." I am alive, abuse me 24 hours but don't belittle Gandhi and Sardar," said PM Modi while inaugurating the Gandhi museum in Rajkot on October 1, 2018, adding "they (the Congress) now realise that they have forgotten them while a chaiwala is giving them their due. He accused the opposition of ignoring Gandhi's ties with Rajkot." Didn't Gandhiji and Rajkot have any ties with each other? Who separated them? Though this land shaped his education, his life was reduced to one event, garland him on October 2 and forget him," said the prime minister. The fact is that BJP has been in power in Gujarat for over a quarter century, and Modi the chief minister for more than half of it. The first BJP chief minister, Keshubhai Patel, hailed from this very region, and the first election Modi fought in his life to become chief minister in 2002 was from Rajkot, so where does the blame lie? Create the question, then answer it, and in the process, crucify the opponent and pick up sympathy/credit, as the case may be. Thus the imagery of the humble tea-seller resurrecting the son-of-the-soil Congress leaders of the freedom struggle whom their own were belittling—killing myriad birds with one stone!
An astute civil servant turned politician, Kejriwal is doing to the BJP in Gujarat exactly what its chief minister did to the Congress-ruled Centre in Delhi during UPA rule.
Kejriwal's move to take on Modi in Varanasi may have seemed exuberant in 2014 but fits in snug with his plans as he takes on Modi on his home turf this election. It is straight and no-holds-barred but controlled aggression that projects a contrasting persona with a soft, even paternalistic exterior and an air of injured innocence that hammers in the message with consistency.
Even if subdued, the immediate impact is that it has started inviting grudging comparisons. Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars, goes a famous quote. Just one state away from being elevated to a national party, Kejriwal and the AAP have little to lose in taking on Modi and the BJP in Gujarat. If you make good, it's the moon, if you don't, you will still fall in the ranks of the opposition stars as the man who took on the might of Modi in his own citadel with just two years to go for 2024.
(R K Misra is a senior journalist based in Ahmedabad)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.