On The spot
Tavleen Singh
Nothing gives us political pundit types more pleasure than being able to say ‘I told you so’. And, so it gives me immense pleasure this week to say that I did tell you over and over again that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was bad news because it stood for the kind of political and economic ideas that have been tried by most political parties already and that have always failed in the past. When AAP formed the government in Delhi there were those among my political pundit peers who were filled with jubilation and they expressed this without hesitation on TV panel discussions and in their columns. Paeans were written to Arvind Kejriwal’s political skills, the humility of his demeanor and the commonness of his attire. Your humble columnist remained skeptical because in my view there was always something dishonest and dangerous about the movement that led to the formation of AAP.
When Anna Hazare went on his first hunger strike on Jantar Mantar and famous TV anchors fell over themselves in their efforts to depict him as India’s new Gandhi. I warned that it was wrong for unelected people to demand the right to make laws. Unfortunately for us the Congress Party was so incapable of managing the movement against corruption that they made mistake after mistake and finally conceded to Anna and gang the right to make a law that will do very little to curb corruption and a great deal to spread the kind of senseless vigilantism that we have seen in Delhi since Kejriwal and his band of vigilante ministers took office.
His law minister should have been arrested the day that he tried to force policemen to ‘raid’ a house without a warrant. At the very least he should have been reprimanded by the Chief Minister of Delhi for trying to take the law into his own hands. Instead he was exalted as a hero and the chief minister himself took to the streets in a siege that was beyond all measure in terms of absurdity. The only good thing that has come out of this farce is that many people who voted for AAP in the Delhi election have now begun to regret what they did. Among them are empty-headed socialites and high-minded intellectuals and they admit that their reason for voting for AAP was because they were ‘sick to death’ of the mainstream political parties. Now there are many among them who are beginning to be nostalgic for Sheila Dixit and for the general sense of order that prevailed in the Indian capital in her time.
This is not to say that things were perfect then. Every citizen of this city who has been unlucky enough to have dealings with the police knows that there are serious flaws in their manner of functioning. On a personal level may I say that when my house was robbed four years ago I was told by everyone that unless I knew someone ‘very high up’ who could help find my stolen property I should just forget about the jewelry and cash that I lost. At first the police made a great show of investigating the crime and informed me that it had to be an ‘inside job’ but then they did nothing. Much worse things happen all the time and nearly always the police fails to act but the answer does not lie in ministers haranguing them in the full glare of television cameras.
The answer lies in coming up with specific reforms and this can only happen if serious attention is paid to governance. This is the most important thing that the AAP Government has failed so far to pay attention to because of its mistaken belief that the root of all India’s problems is corruption. There is no doubt that corruption is a factor but it is only a factor not the root. Bad governance is at the root of most of India’s problems and this would have become evident to Delhi’s chief minister if he had bothered to spend some time on governance. Instead, he has joined his vigilante ministers in giving us a roll call of gimmicks that have now so frightened the citizens of Delhi that there are many former supporters of AAP who are beginning to move quietly away. Kejriwal likes to announce, almost on a daily basis, that he could not care less if his government fell because he is certain that whenever elections are held his party will come back to power with an even larger number of seats. He might have a few nasty surprises in store for him and so will the Congress Party.
After the drubbing that voters gave Congress in Rajasthan, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh the coterie of ‘wise men’ that surround Rahul Gandhi came up with the supposedly ‘brilliant’ idea that AAP would be able to stop Narendra Modi. It was with this in mind that the Delhi unit of our oldest political party was ordered to lend an AAP government ‘outside support’. Now that things have begun to unravel in the first few weeks of the new government taking office there are whispers about how Congress is deliberately giving AAP a long enough rope to hang itself with. Sadly for Congress the rope is likely to be long enough to hang it as well and the man who could end up benefiting most from an AAP government in Delhi is Modi.
The more street protests that Delhi’s chief minister participates in and the more vigilantism that his ministers exhibit the more the chances are that the urban, middle class voter will see Modi as a shining alternative. It needs to be said in the clearest possible terms here that it is Modi’s personal appeal that is the factor and not the BJP’s image. In the past ten years the BJP has been as bad an opposition party as Congress has been a government. It is because of disappointment with both these political parties that AAP rose to dizzying heights of electoral success. And, the time is not far off when it is likely to fall from those dizzying heights in the most ignominious manner. But, this does not mean that Indian voters are not looking for new leaders in a time of great disappointment and despair. They most certainly are looking for newer and better political leaders but after the AAP experience they will be sure to look harder and more carefully.
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