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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.