Arvind Kejriwal is a politician who likes to make his point emphatically. When he launches a movement to demand a law, he makes it look like a revolution. When he wants to address the problem of faulty electricity meters, he’s willing to climb a pole and break the law to connect a line.
When he wants to make accusations others do only in private, he will make sure he gets countless defamation cases filed against him. When he wants to get rid of those countless cases, he will go around apologising to them all, one by one, like a supplicant.
Similarly, when he decides to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he will go to the extent of saying that Modi wants him killed. When he decides it is a bad idea to criticise Modi, he will seal his lips no matter what blunders Modi makes. And when he decides it is time to surrender before Modi, the surrender will be absolute: mind, body and soul.
This is a high risk-high reward way of doing things. The rewards are Himalayan: the history-making Lokpal movement, and historic election victories that made him win around 90 per cent seats.
In this attitude, he shares a trait with Narendra Modi. Modi likes to take big risks. If they fail (demonetisation), move on, take another one (GST).
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The high risk game
High risk can also mean that when things go bad, they go really bad. It means that Kejriwal goes to Punjab and makes his party lose an election it was winning. It’s so bad that he has to come up with an EVM conspiracy theory to ward off his own party colleagues asking questions of his debacle in Punjab. When Kejriwal was criticising Modi 24 hours a day, he started sounding personal and power hungry, and a man in a hurry to be Prime Minister. In 2015, after he won 67 seats in Delhi assembly election, he decided to unceremoniously sack colleagues, who had refused to be yes men, thus creating an image of an undemocratic, authoritarian leader.
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Politics of ambiguity
We are just seeing Modi’s high-risk investment in his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping go for a toss, even as his high-risk “surgical strikes” on Pakistan paid him rich political dividends.
When this way of doing politics works, it does because it provides clarity. Voters know exactly which way they are being taken by their leader. This clarity becomes a cause for trust. But, how do you trust a leader who himself doesn’t sound sure of which path he wants to take?
Yet, this clarity can also mean that voters can be equally sure they don’t like what you’re offering. Which is why some of the smartest politicians have been masters of ambiguity. The most skillful politicians can practice the politics of ambiguity, walk a tightrope and never fall off it, at least for a very long time.
The greatest practitioner of the politics of ambiguity in recent memory was Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He could afford to be both in favour of Ram Mandir and against it. He could be Hindutva and not be Hindutva. He could be RSS and not-so-RSS. And yet the people trusted him. Even those who didn’t vote for him had a grudging admiration for the leader.
There have also been others, such as Narasimha Rao and Nitish Kumar. Nitish Kumar may have lost trust because he turns around in his bed a bit too often, but he can still do one of his balancing acts. He can support the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in Parliament and then oppose it when it boomerangs.
When Arvind Kejriwal won 67 out of 70 seats in the 2015 Delhi assembly election, he thought he could position himself as the alternative to Modi by speaking against him all day. It took defeats in the Punjab assembly election and Delhi’s municipal poll for him to realise that his was a wrong strategy, and that it was quiet governance he needed to focus on.
In 2020, he won 62 of 70 seats in Delhi assembly despite a high-decibel communal campaign by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). With a second consecutive emphatic victory, was there any need for Kejriwal to surrender before Modi-Amit Shah? Kejriwal seems to think brand Modi is too strong to dissipate any time soon, so there’s no point taking it head on. Fine, but should that amount to surrendering and subsuming oneself before Modi?
When Arvind Kejriwal ‘orders an FIR’ against the Tablighi Jamaat Markaz but not one against Kapil Mishra, he shows himself as having surrendered to Home Minister Amit Shah. Kejriwal seems to have calculated that being nice to Modi-Shah would mean they would give him some room, politically, as well as administratively in Delhi. He couldn’t be more wrong. Amit Shah saw an opportunity in Kejriwal’s poor management of the Covid crisis and swooped in. For over two weeks now, it has looked like Amit Shah is the chief minister of Delhi and Arvind Kejriwal is L-G Anil Baijal’s assistant. In other words, Arvind Kejriwal is now a lame duck chief minister.
Also read: How ‘overconfident’ Delhi made a mess of Covid fight, forcing Modi govt to pick up the pieces
Digging his own grave
Unless Kejriwal changes track, he could continue as a lame duck CM until 2025, and then, become history. Muslims and Modi supporters will both desert him. Who wants a BJP stooge when they can vote for the BJP itself? Why go for a poor imitation when the original doesn’t cost extra?
If he wants to change track, he must go back to the lesson he learnt after losing Punjab in 2017: focus on governance in Delhi.
Kejriwal was able to pass his first 5 years by giving us gimmickry in place of governance. The odd-even scheme was a tamasha that had everyone talking, but didn’t solve the capital’s air pollution problem. Spending the Delhi government’s generous budget on improving school infrastructure was easy, and not letting badly-performing students take board exams to improve pass percentages was even easier. Subsidising electricity was just monetary re-allocation. It took a crisis (Covid) to test Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) real mettle on governance, and it failed badly.
Arvid Kejriwal, the self-declared commoner and outsider to politics, has today become more of a politician than most politicians. He needs to wear his AAP cap again and focus on governance. Instead of overthinking political strategies with his upstart advisors all day, he should spend more time with his files at the state secretariat.
Unambiguity in governance and ambiguity in politics will help Kejriwal go a long way. But if politics is all he is interested in, he should go the whole hog and join the National Democratic Alliance.
The author is contributing editor to ThePrint. Views are personal.