In her first response on the arrest of her chief minister and party leader, Atishi, a key minister in the Delhi government, said that Arvind Kejriwal isn’t merely an individual. He is, instead, an idea.
It follows that she means his arrest, or temporary removal from the scene, won’t mean a crippling blow to his politics, party or government.
That’s a good and interesting point. Let us take it at face value to begin with. We will know in the next few days what it means for his party and the two governments it runs, in Delhi and Punjab. The more important discussion, however, is about the implications this will have for national politics.
Theoretically, if the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is able to withstand this blow and persevere till Kejriwal is eventually released, it could emerge stronger. Kejriwal could then return as a leader with his charisma burnished by time spent in the BJP’s prison.
If your basic credibility remains intact, and if your ‘base’ is immune to corruption charges against you, some time in a rival government’s jail never hurt an Indian politician. On the other hand, if your government flounders in your absence, your party lapses into disarray and is crippled further by defections — which the BJP will be working quite assiduously to bring about — it will send your politics into terminal decline. That’s the juncture at which the party now stands.
If Kejriwal is today an idea, the ‘idea’ he and his politics grew around was a no-holds-barred fight against corruption. That is the reason the Modi government has now tarred him and his entire party and government with the same brush: corruption.
It isn’t the individuals they are after. It is the idea once synonymous with Kejriwal. That everybody in public life and debate — politicians, corporates, media, judges, everybody — is corrupt and complicit. Or, as the India Against Corruption (IAC) war cries went: sab chor hain (everybody is a thief) and sab mile hue hain (they are all complicit). It followed that the only one truly fighting them all was Kejriwal.
That’s how he became an idea, which the Modi government now wants to destroy with corruption charges: “Look, look now, who has been talking all these years.”
Over the past decade, the BJP witnessed that idea of Kejriwal gain ground. It won Punjab and got some votes in Goa, but more importantly, won five seats even in Gujarat.
It polled about 13 percent of the vote in the Modi-Shah BJP’s pocket borough, showed some growth in municipal elections and set alarm bells ringing. This BJP may run its politics on the grievances of the past, but it doesn’t fight today’s battles today. Like any true superpower, it fights the day after tomorrow’s battles today, and ideally far from its own territory. The 2022 state elections showed AAP growing in the most valued part of the BJP’s territory, its heartland of heartlands. That is when the die was cast and AAP was marked out as the rival of the day after tomorrow, to be finished now.
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If the BJP succeeds and the idea of Kejriwal now declines, it will reaffirm a larger trend in national politics. That all the efforts made by popular, powerful and ambitious leaders to expand their political geographies have failed.
Over the past three years, we have seen Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) invest time, energy and money in Goa, Tripura and Meghalaya in the hope of acquiring a national footprint, and fail.
If the TMC’s failure was spectacular, former Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) replacing the T (Telangana) in his party’s name with B (Bharat) turned out to be a ridiculous disaster. None of the other state parties can even dream of growing beyond their ethnic boundaries. The Left, once the only other pan-state power, is grateful enough to hold on to just one state.
The AAP became the only party that succeeded in expanding its presence, and rose to be the only party in the country other than the BJP and the Congress to rule in more than one state. This is precisely why the BJP has decided to cut it to size. It is fighting a threat for a distant future today.
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To understand the significance of the political shift caused by Kejriwal’s arrest, check out the political party to have risen to his and his party’s defence with the greatest alacrity. It is the Congress, the party Kejriwal and his 2010-14 campaign destroyed through its anti-corruption movement, routinely demanding the arrest of its topmost ministers.
Why, then, is the Congress the party most vocal and active in his defence, and not merrily rolling in schadenfreude? Two other factors matter besides the partial alliance in Delhi and Gujarat.
The first is that the Congress, like any other anti-BJP party, knows that what is happening to AAP today could happen to it tomorrow. Its chief ministers in Karnataka, Telangana and Himachal Pradesh are watching this very closely. They are particularly interested in seeing what kind of fight their own party, especially its legal talent, is able to put up.
The second factor is that the Congress now knows that it is the only force — however weakened it might be — that stands between the BJP and India’s evolution into a single-party Republic. Because once it is out of the way, the BJP could sort out the other regional powers en passant: co-opting some, demolishing others. The Congress knows it will be its turn next.
The key takeaway is that the assault on AAP has made India a nation of two political forces, the BJP and the Congress. Never mind the power differential between them.
It is safe now to say that in the years to come, at least till 2029, the Congress will be the BJP’s only national rival, however weak it is. Despite its serial defeats, it retains (at least it did until 2019) its vote share of nearly 20 per cent. As long as one out of five Indians votes for you despite your many failings, waffling leadership and near-zero hope of victory and a return to power, you stay in the game. If that 20 percent even becomes 25, the game changes.
“Good point,” you might say if you were from the Congress, and even steal a moment to smile. Then the reality check. The first thing to do is to protect yourself from similar assaults from the BJP in the months to come. And for that, as the BJP is doing, fight your battles of the day after tomorrow today. That is why the Congress has risen so spiritedly to AAP’s defence. It is fighting for its own survival, to still be in the ring and up for a fight, with the inevitability of a two-party system in the country.
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The whole article doesn’t talk of the crimes of this chameleon. Perhaps, SG will condone the Khalistani connections of AAP too. People are not as gullible as you.
When Modi or the BJP is accused of corruption, that communist toilet paper ‘The Hindu’, N Ram, Siddharth Varadarajan and his cohorts pronounce them guilty even when courts hold them not guilty. But they won’t utter a word against Saint Kejriwal who is accused of being neck deep in corruption.
If you’re gonna make blatant biased forum posts like these, just write on the medium instead.
75% of the 20% vote congress gets is Muslim and Christian votes or Jehadi or anti hindu votes . Hindus have mostly deserted congress and that is the root cause of decline of congress from Indian politics as Anthony had correctly pointed out .
I agree. And I think Congress is defending Kejriwaal not only because it fears BJP but also AAP as well. How could they (Cong) not, you yourself implied that BJP is much more comfortable with Congress as opposition and considers AAP a threat.
Also, all non-BJP political parties of India still do not really believe in their existence crisis at all. Because if they had they would have been able to hold INDIA together. Even more, they could have merged all the parties into a single unified opposition Party, but they r busy in their usual affairs like in any other election. If they were really battling for their survival they would be reforming their parties, which is something they still have power to do. For instance look at the rot in Congress since Indira– Gandhi Parivaar proxy rulling, appeasement vote bank politics, lack of vision etc. If Modi somehow loses 2024, all these parties will carry on as if Modi and all his dictatorship never happened at all.
They still have learnt NOTHING. There is no real sacrifice anywhere in opposition. And so, Modi will keep on winning and bullying them. Yogi is already waiting for his turn 🙂
Does BJP has the ability to destroy the idea called Kejriwal? It doesn’t have that ability. Jailing of Kejriwal is the trigger AAP needed to catapult it into all over India. Modi’s end time has started.
Shekhat Gupta I have stopped reading the Print . Your political leanings are blatant and your articles are hollow. I just read this one today and feel very put off. will not read the Print at all
Given India’s global ambitions, some thought could be given to how the world, especially the West, our strategic and economic partner, will view these developments. It may not suffice to task the ORF to devise an index to rate Indian democracy. Foreign governments, like Germany, weigh their words with care. Expect western media to be more robust.
In India, jailed and corrupt become popular. This culture started during colonial times.
Difficult to say where journalistic integrity ends and devotion to a politician starts. Assuming there is a thing called journalistic integrity in the first place.