In July-August, as a Covid peak came down, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal started speaking of a ‘Delhi model’ for fighting Covid. This was a blatant lie at so many levels, because Delhi had done a terrible job of managing the Covid crisis in April-June. Whether it was shortage of hospital beds, rules preventing people from getting tested, alleged discrepancy in death figures or fighting with private labs and hospitals to shift responsibility — it was a model for disaster.
It was the central government’s intervention that helped change things around. None of this prevented Arvind Kejriwal from going on and on about the ‘Delhi model’, because propaganda and reality don’t have to match.
Since then, we have had a second and now a third peak of Covid. And each time, Arvind Kejriwal has been found wanting in his efforts. Even when it is known that another peak is likely, as was this winter, he is able to do precious little. Once again, the courts are unhappy and Union Home Minister Amit Shah is taking charge.
Also read: Arvind Kejriwal has run out of excuses over his Covid failures in Delhi
The Delhi model of gimmickry
Arvind Kejriwal is telling us not to panic, which means the situation must be really bad. Kejriwal’s comprehensive failure at managing Covid in Delhi has called his bluff on governance. Central to the problem is Kejriwal’s worldview, which is nothing but gimmickry. Back during the first peak of Covid, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s answer to shortage of hospital beds was an app that never worked. We have now forgotten all about the app.
Then their answer was to distribute oximeters so citizens could check their oxygen levels. That hasn’t prevented a third peak either. However, the AAP realised that testing oxygen levels is good political campaigning. When an AAP worker goes and checks someone’s oxygen levels with an oximeter, the citizen feels like the AAP cares about him or her. So, the AAP has been doing its oximeter gimmick across India.
Despite all this, Arvind Kejriwal says the third peak will go away just like the previous two peaks. Of course, what comes also goes. He can say the same when the fourth peak arrives. But can he explain why he couldn’t prevent a third peak? He blames air pollution, which may be scientifically correct, but that brings us to another giant failure of the AAP.
Also read: Arvind Kejriwal has locked himself in a cage and given the keys to Amit Shah
An RO in the Yamuna
If air pollution is so bad that it is causing a third Covid peak in Delhi, why not impose the odd-even rationing of cars? After all, the AAP had captured international attention with the odd-even scheme and has insisted it helped reduce air pollution. So why not do it now when Kejriwal himself admits air pollution is causing a Covid peak? Surely this is the best time for the odd-even scheme when people are dying of both Covid and cancer caused by air pollution?
But odd-even is completely forgotten because it was a comprehensive policy failure. It did nothing to reduce air pollution. If it did, the AAP would be imposing odd-even from November to January. Yet it succeeded as a gimmick: it caught everyone’s attention, it forced everyone to understand what Kejriwal is doing in a way that people won’t notice whether a polluting industrial plant has been shut down or not.
This time Kejriwal has come up with a new gimmick to mislead the citizens of Delhi into thinking he has the answers to the air pollution problem. He has started putting up smog towers, which is like installing an RO to clean up the Yamuna.
Of course, engineer Kejriwal would know that smog towers would do zilch to reduce air pollution. But crores of taxpayers’ money must be spent just so that the public sees the smog meters and says ‘Kejriwal is trying’. The debate will shift from whether Kejriwal is doing anything to reduce pollution to whether smog towers work. We might even be asked to go into the technical details of how a smog tower works. When you can’t convince them, confuse them.
Also read: It’s time Arvind Kejriwal joined the NDA, à la Nitish Kumar
Enter identity politics
The pandemic year has comprehensively called the AAP’s bluff on governance. The sorry state of affairs in Delhi government hospitals doesn’t allow them to brag about running a few OPD clinics. As schools remain closed, they can no longer brag about re-painting school walls. The annual gimmick of showing a high pass percentage in government schools by disallowing likely-to-fail students from taking exams will have to wait until March-April.
Arvind Kejriwal won a re-election by giving free electricity but that won’t help him win again and again. Delhi is bursting at the seams, choking and panicking. At such a time, Kejriwal’s pipe dream of national expansion needs more than just governance gimmicks. It needs political gimmicks.
As an ideology-free populist, Kejriwal tries to follow public mood. So, if public mood is against corruption, he’ll put up a movement against corruption. If the people no longer care about corruption, Kejriwal will forget about it too.
Question is, what is the public mood today? Kejriwal has decided the public mood today is Hindu nationalism. So he’s decided to make a Rightward shift. We now have him and his entire Cabinet perform a grand Diwali Puja ceremony in Delhi’s famous Akshardham Temple, against the popular tradition of ‘ghar wali Diwali’. The AAP hopes that liberal critics will decry this as ‘communal’, making the AAP look centre-Right, which is the positioning it wants. If next year Kejriwal thinks the public mood is ‘secular’, he will start visiting Sufi shrines.
Also read: No soft Hindutva, no Left Revolution, Kejriwal establishing a new centre in Indian politics
What do the people want?
This is an incorrect reading of public mood, and even if it is not, it is poor strategy. Except for Delhi, where the BJP does not have good local leaders, nowhere in India will Hindutva-minded voters dump the BJP to vote for the AAP just because Arvind Kejriwal is screaming ‘Main bhi Hindu hoon’ (I am also Hindu). He will, however, lose the Muslim vote in the process. The Rajiv Gandhi mistake, just repeated by Kamal Nath in Madhya Pradesh.
Hindutva succeeds in polarisation only because it is anti-Muslim. Even if Kejriwal becomes actively anti-Muslim (rather than just passively looking the other way in the Delhi riots or allowing the persecution of an Umar Khalid), the Hindutva voter has no need to vote for a poor imitation of the BJP.
That still leaves us with the question, what do people want that a party like the AAP could give them? People want solutions to their economic problems. They want the economy to get going again. They want jobs, good education and health, and hope for a better future. The AAP can see that its governance-by-gimmicks trick is unable to give people hope for a more prosperous future. The result is Arvind Kejriwal becoming a baba. We’ll have to endure a lot more bhajan-kirtan. Someone gift him a saffron stole, please.
The author is contributing editor to ThePrint. Views are personal.
Yeah some people don’t care that AK’s govt has never been convicted of any corruption, that they consistently invested more in health and Keynesian economics more than anybody else – both of which, however much pappu-fanboys may want to deny, did help Delhiites fight. They don’t care that AK was among the first in the world to try home isolation, plasma bank and post-COVID recovery wards.
All some people care about is that anybody who kicks Congress’ bottom is a “pseudo-liberal sanghi”.
To Shivam Vij, I say this – if you’re so convinced that Amir Shah is the one controlling COVID situation in Delhi, then how come he hasn’t done so for NDA states including his home turf of Gujarat? And though the situation did get out of hand at times, it was nowhere near as bad as NY that u seem to imply. NY remains the worst affected hotspot in the world and USA accounts for about 25% of the global covid death count.
Even if u have valid criticism to make, when u paint it thru political bias, it will be laughed out of debates.
Print should have some bar even for opinion pieces. Allowing authors like him and Abhijit Iyer-Mitra is the reason I will never pay for The Print. The Wire, The Hindu, Newslaundry, Scroll and The News Minute holds up much better standards and I’m happy to pay for them even when they factually criticize AAP
LoL! Seven years later India’s liberal media and intellectuals who have been crapping about Kejriwal the new poster boy , discover what the rest have been saying all along. This man and his party is nothing but a chimp swinging from one gimmick to another- starting from his campaign to become a “Giant-Killer” by contesting against Modi at Varanasi, to his invitation to Delhi’s TV media to film him driving every day to work in his old Maruti (and quietly consigning it to the dustbin once he came back as the CM the second time, and going around with a cavalcade of Toyotas – with no TV cameras panning him now) and so many other dramebaazi- this man is nothing but the clown who gives paisa vasool entertainment. Sadly, many see him and his Party as him as India’s last hope
As far as Covid is concerned nobody can do much in a respiratory pandemic unless the virus helps and turns less hostile. I think it has already done that. To my mind atleast 50% of Delhi is already infected till date. Meanwhile every leader in the world are playing to the gallery to keep their cheering crowd happy. Kejriwal is no exception.
Didn’t knew that even print hires under the table bjp IT cell workers to write such illogical, irrational and highly biased articles. This guy has put many allegations against AAP but miserably failed to back any of them with proper reasoning and logic.
Seem like there was a plan to tarnish Arvind Kejriwal’s image just at the time of chhath pooja so the immature but highly paid (again under-the-table) writer ended up writing a poorly planned article just like bjp releases its policies (read demonetization, GST etc.)
Absolutely spot on…seems like BJP spokesperson is blabbering….
In short, the pandemic just opens the unpreparedness of the government of all the states.
Don’t worry vij, the people of Delhi will give him Saffron ‘Stole’ by the next term of election, till then let us enjoy how many rabbits he can pull off from his Magic Hat. A Very good article.
Thanks
Nagesh Rao.
Nothing can tick of the Urban naxals like politicians participating in Hindu Poojas. Muslim Iftar parties are ok.
Author’s views seems completely biased. It seems author is not telling facts but telling that a specific person is not good.
Disappointed by reading this article on Print.
Arvind Kejriwal is some notch above your venerated dynast– Obama certified Now . At What ever position he is now or whatever may be differences in his style of working , he earned his present political standings by working hard to establish himself as man to watch. For many people believe that in years to come he may develop as a pivot around whom politics of India may revolve. .. So it is not surprising to ridicule him by a family retainer journalists as most of your articles are not a well-researched journalist output but sheer sheet of propaganda for departed dynasty of pre-2014 era. Carry on it gives some enjoyment to read non-sense also.
To understand the “Kejriwal” model of good governance one has to look further back to the “Gujarat” model. It was full of gimmicks, positive spin by planting stories on pliant journalists and intimidating authors who tried to question the narrative. Not a single Gujarati I know who was born outside Gujarat wanted to go back to Gujarat to take advantage of the “Gujarat” model. Infact Gujaratis make up one of the highest applicants for immigrant visas. No high end jobs in AI, tech, medicine, aviation, robotics emanate from Gujarat. They only have work for labour class Biharis who are forced to look for jobs anywhere because of the pathetic state of Bihar. So when the Gujarati gang could successfully hoodwink the rest of India with their Gujarat model why would Kejriwal not try with his “Delhi” model. Soon you may also get a taste of “UP” model on the national scene! Such are the times we live in.
bahaha this is so amusing to watch. it doesnt take much for left to eat their own.
I am unable to gift him a saffron stole. Instead I give him a free advice!
Let him grow a beard! It comes at no cost, certainly at no cost to the exchequer! But his messaging will be complete.
Yes, this gutter hack trying to put labels –“oh, we are pseudo sickulars and we decide who we label as right wing, who pursue identity politics” and such nonsense. This bigoted hack’s beard is on fire. Pathetic creature. Should crawl back into his foul gutter — his natural habitat.
I don’t understand why you guys are against aap and arvind kejriwal . everytime i read your article it only makes me upset , It is the only party which is corruption free and is doing some work and ,media should appreciate their work instead of critisising their every move Do you really want bjp and congress to loot our nation for upcoming years are you against the development of our country?
It is an entirely correct assessment of AK. AK was a hope for sometime. I had still given him the benefit of the doubt when he avoided challenging Hindutva communalism at the time of the Delhi elections, to avoid polarisation. But I realised that he had no guts or principles when he did not stand up for the Delhi riot victims – because that would mean standing up for Muslims.
As the author says, Congress and Aap want to say they are also Hindus, and they have nothing else to offer. But those who are suckers for Hindu communalism go for the real thing.
Indeed, there is no Delhi model, there is a Kerala model that is recognised internationally.
It is not that the Hindutva fascsists know how to run the economy, and manage Covid and China, better than AAP or Congress. But they know how to continue with their anti-Muslim posturing, and the Hindus will buy that.
India flattered to deceive, she was on the threshold of being an emerging economy due to MMS, but that is gone – for good. Modi has undermined the economy but Hindus don’t care. Perhaps it is best for India. Hindu chauvinism would increase if they had money as well in their pockets.
Kissinger had dismissed India as the largest unimportant country. That assessment is still true, although many Hindus today are full of themselves and think Modi has made them some one in the world, and everyone is in admiration because of yoga. Modi put up some glamorous shows for Hindus abroad, and the Hindus think the whole world is in awe of India. Leaders of other countries do not go abroad and stage such shows, because they do not have such large diasporas. The reason India has such a large Hindu disapora is actually because India is not a success, so Hindus go abroad and settle !
Shocking Statement by
” THE STUPIDO ” .
Does he think that fake news spread by AK that churches were attacked by HINDUS just before elections to create communal disharmony was
” JUST A GIMMICK ” .
Support to anti CAA PROTESTORS with biryani and later WITH MANPOWER FOR RIOTERING was
” JUST A GIMMICK ” .
SHOCKING SUPPORT FOR
aCUSE aBUSE pARTY.
A hack job by RaGa loyalist.
To pick one, let other states run OPDs.
It is regrettable that the author considers doing a puja in a temple, communal.