From the moment I landed at Delhi airport on a balmy evening last week I found myself inundated with questions about Arvind Kejriwal. Did I think he was doing the right thing? Did I think he had gone too far? Did I think his political party would succeed? Would I come onto this television programme to discuss this? Would I come to that television studio to discuss that? I have been away from Delhi for only a couple of weeks but in this time Kejriwal has managed to become the most important political story in this political weatherglass of a city. So much so that even the sting operation conducted by Aaj Tak on Salman Khurshid’s charitable trust was so subsumed by the Kejriwal factor that people seemed to think it was his new political party that had been responsible for the Law Minister finding himself in a sticky spot.
Kejriwal helped strengthen this impression by leading a protest march of disabled people to the Prime Minister’s house to demand that the Law Minister and his wife be arrested immediately. And by giving everyone interviews about how he thought this was the worst corruption scandal of all because it involved ‘stealing’ from the handicapped. In his usual style he has declared them guilty till they can prove their innocence. Having known Salman and Louise as personal friends for thirty years, I have no doubt at all that they are the least likely people to steal anything from anyone leave alone from a charitable trust in Salman’s grandfather’s name. If there is money missing it is probably because of underlings having helped themselves to it and if signatures of officials have been forged it is probably without the knowledge of either Salman or Louise. But, times are bad for politicians so they are less likely to be believed than their accusers and the Law Minister’s display of anger and arrogance at his press conference did not help. When I asked my old friend and colleague Karan Thapar how he thought Salman had handled the accusations he defended the minister robustly and said that if I watched the interview he did with the minister I would see that he had answered all the questions.
Perhaps. But, the times as I said are bad for politicians and it is on this that Kejriwal is making capital for his new political party. It is a political party that appears, from its initial vision document, to have nothing new to say and even uses old words like ‘swaraj’ to say it but despite this Kejriwal has emerged as a hero for India’s growing middle class. Even people who did not like him earlier, and those who believed that once Anna Hazare withdrew his support it would be the end of Kejriwal now admit that they are beginning to think twice. They say that what has caused them to think again is because Kejriwal has shown that he has the courage to rip the veils off ever political holy cow that comes his way.
The holiest of these holy cows has been Sonia Gandhi and her family. This has allowed her to disassociate herself from her former best friend Ottavio Quattrocchi so that although Bofors bribe money found its way into Swiss bank accounts with Quattrocchi’s name on them Sonia has never been asked why this happened. The media has permitted her to absolve herself by saying that if her friends did bad things in her name she cannot be responsible. True but would Bofors have paid Quattrocchi if he had not delivered? And could he have delivered without the help of Rajiv Gandhi? Not even the opposition parties have dared ask these questions.
So when Kejriwal started publicly asking questions about the sudden riches of Sonia’s son-in-law Robert Vadra it had the effect of a nuclear explosion in political Delhi. An explosion that drove senior ministers of the Government of India into the nearest television studio to defend their leader’s fair name from being besmirched. It took several hours before they discovered that Mr. Vadra was only a ‘private citizen’. By then their aggressive hysteria had gone a long way towards making Kejriwal the man of the match for viewers across the country.
He seems also to have become the man dictating the political agenda without offering the people of India anything resembling a new political idea. So when he suggests an almighty Lokpal does he know what he is suggesting? Does he know that when his ideas are translated into action this will mean a bigger role for the Indian state in the economy and a huge expansion of our already vast bureaucratic infrastructure? Does he not know that this is exactly the system of governance that India had for its first five decades of independence and that it left the government bankrupt and seventy percent of Indians living below a disgraceful poverty line?
The ‘vision-document’ Kejriwal offers is replete with good intentions and banalities and reads like an essay written by a clever schoolboy. It talks of returning power into the hands of the people and allowing the people to decide their political future apparently without noticing that we already have a parliamentary democracy in place. A democracy in which elections have been held without fail (almost) every five years and that this is not an achievement to be scoffed at. His economic ideas are even more naïve than his political ones. If his political party ever comes to power it may find it very hard to make every economic decision in the village square as his vision document suggests.
So my personal view of Kejriwal is that he is an activist and not a real political leader and that the word ‘corruption’ looms so large in his political thought process that he finds it hard to see beyond it. I am very interested to see where he will get his funds from when elections come around and he needs to finance his party’s candidates. Having said this, though, I am forced to concede that he has touched a chord in the public imagination. The average Indian voter is sick and tired of politicians and their progeny. He is sick and tired of elections that throw up time and again the same sort of leaders who prove as soon as they can that they have come into public life to serve their personal interests rather than those of the country. So for the moment Kejriwal seems like a shining star.
Trending Now
E-Paper
Follow our WhatsApp channel