There are
things about activists and polemicists, memory has little place in their
argument. Arundhati Roy said she would secede from India after the nuclear
tests and she is still around; Medha Patkar threatened ‘jal samadhi’ many
times, but, of course, with the grace of God, she, too, is still very much with
us. So it is with Kejriwal. He first denounced politics, and then decided to
contest elections. Despite the fact that his party did exceedingly well, but
not enough to form a government, he swore he would not take the support of the
BJP or the Congress, but within a week, accepted the Congress support to form a
government that is now history.
The
collapse of the Aam Aadmi Party government on Friday has opened itself up to as
many analyses, as the streams of opinion that constitute the party, and I
suppose, this republic. Arun Jaitley of the BJP says it is the end of a
nightmare. The Congress and Shiv Sena said that he ran away from
responsibility. Others say it is deep strategy to get out of a losing game and
jump onto a winning one — the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
You would
have to have been an incredible optimist to believe that it was going to work
in the first place. Here was a man who had built up a movement that tore the
insides out of the United Progressive Alliance. He reluctantly entered formal
politics, but shocked everyone by winning 28 out of 70 seats in the Delhi state
assembly elections, just three behind the BJP, whose party it spoilt. After
playing coy, he accepted Congress support and formed the government, which came
apart last Friday.
From the
outset, he declared war on two key pillars of any government — the
administration and the police. For this, he got the grateful thanks, not so
much of the middle-class which wanted better governance, but the poor who face
the brunt of the thoroughly corruption riddled system daily.
All this
while, Mukesh Ambani did not figure in Kejriwal’s demonology. But suddenly, he
is there, now manipulating the Congress and the BJP to bring down the AAP
government. At the heart of the Kejriwal system is the concept of constantly
shifting targets. When one proves elusive, head for the other. So, first it was
the Congress, then the Delhi administration and now Mukesh Ambani, BJP and
Narendra Modi.
Kejriwal
thrives on constant movement and all-pervasive enemies. In another time and
place, they yielded fascism.
But
thankfully, as of now at least, Mr Kejriwal does not believe in strong arm
tactics, though his lieutenant Somnath Bharti is not quite above that either.
In another era, Kejriwal, a saviour like Robespierre or Mao would have simply
shot/guillotined his opponents, and replaced the government with his men. But
in the era of democracy, he had to confront a system that works with thorough
rules. And the rules said that he did not have a majority. It also said that
the administrators and police could not be purged simply by fiat; there had to
be due process.
Since
taking on, these two key components of administration, who are admittedly
overwhelmingly corrupt, was central to the Kejriwal mission. It was clear that
he was not interested in making things work, but on making a point and having
made that in 49 action-packed days, he has left Delhi still waiting for its
saviour.
Well,
it’s not just Delhi. It is the whole country and that is what lends power to
the AAP. The system is rotten; both principal parties have run it at various
times, but they have simply used it to their own benefit, leaving the masses to
their fate.
As if to
highlight the Kejriwal drama, the national Parliament was showing last week
just how unconcerned it is about the issues that affect the people. And the
message coming across from everywhere seems to be that there is no hope.
But, and
this is the beauty of democracy, it leaves us options, unlike the poor Chinese,
who had to suffer Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Great Famine and the Cultural
Revolution in succession, losing tens of millions. There can be little doubt
that the churning that we are witnessing is going to come up with a positive
result for the nation. No, it may be Modi, and it may not. Changes of the kind
the country is looking for do not come in election cycles. These relate to
longer term social and behavioural shifts.
There can
be no doubt that we need a paradigm change in governance, not just in the way
our police and municipalities function, but how our corporates behave towards
investors, banks and consumers. It is difficult not to see that one era — the
one that came with Mandal and the crony capitalism of liberalisation — is
coming to an end. There are some who would take us back up the road to the
Mandir. But that, too, is not what the country is looking for.
Mid Day
February 18, 2014
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