The rise and fall of Kejriwal

 

The rise and fall of Kejriwal

The Anna Hazare’s movement India Against Corruption (IAC) had unsettled the UPA government of Manmohan Singh. The Movement had brought two major developments that transformed the Indian politics. First, the rise of Arvind Kejriwal as a power center in the national capital and the second the dislodging of the UPA government leading to the  installation of the right-wing BJP national government led by Narendra Modi.

 

It was the inept handling of the Anna Movement that resulted in these developments. Had the UPA government collected, through its intelligence agenciesthe, the right inputs about the Anna movement and the forces involved and the real motive behind it, and acted imaginatively and decisively, and not panicked and surrendered under pressure, the national political scenario that saw Kejriwal installed as the Delhi Chief Minister and Modi as the Prime Minister in 2013 and 2014,  respectively, would have been different. 

Prashant Bhushan says that they did not realise then that the Anna Movement was hijacked by the Sangh Parivar which used it to achieve its goal of ousting the UPA government and capturing power.  The movement was infiltrated by the RSS volunteers and the elements that had vested interest. Once their objectives were achieved the Jan Lokpal movement and the so-called movement IAC died without a whisper. Why doesn’t Anna Hazare now speak about the corruption that eroded the credibility of public institutions and the misusing of central agencies against political rivals?  

  

The Team Anna that comprised, among others, Kejriwal and Kiren Bedi, had misled the people that the Jan Lokpal Bill was a panacea for corruption, as if the angles from heaven would descend on India to run the pubic administrative apparatus. Though the Manmohan Singh government ensured enacting of the Lokpal and Lokayukta Act in December 2013, that came into effect from 16 January 2014, corruption today is deeply rooted and all pervasive.  No body hears about the Lokpal. The root cause of corruption is people’s tendency to bribe and get their work done. Unless people stop bribing and speak against abuse of power by public servants wherever and whenever they encounter in their day-to-day life, corruption will not end.   

 

The National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI) of Aruna Roy was responsible for the RTI movement. This resulted in passing the most revolutionary legislation the Right to Information Act in 2005 that empowers ordinary citizens to ensure transparency and accountability in the functioning of public authorities. Kejriwal was associated with the RTI movement. Earlier he started an NGO ‘Parivartan’ that addressed citizens’ grievances. He established the Public Cause Research Foundation in December 2006, together with Manish Sisodia and Abhinandan Sekhri. He donated his Ramon Magsaysay Award prize money as a seed fund. Prashant Bhushan and Kiran Bedi served as the Foundation’s trustees.

 

In 2011, Kejriwal joined the Anna movement and shot into prominence. By mid-2012, he had replaced Anna Hazare as the face of the anti-corruption movement. Kejriwal and other activists decided to enter politics and contest elections. In November 2012, they launched the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Kejriwal was elected as the party's National Convener. The party’s name reflects the phrase Aaam Aadmi or common man, whose interests Kejriwal proposed to represent. 

The establishment of AAP caused a rift between Kejriwal and Hazare and ultimately they parted ways. Thus, the AAP was the offshoot of the Anna movement. And with a basic ballpoint pen in his pocket, muffler wrapped around his neck, baggy sweaters and driving a blue Wagon R car, a bespectacled Kejriwal caught the imagination of the middle-class as an archetypal common man.

 

In 2013, the AAP contested the Delhi Assembly election, winning 28 out of 70 seats. The AAP formed a minority government and Kejriwal became the Chief Minister on 28 December 2013. He defeated a three-time Congress Chief Minister Sheela Dikshit from the New Delhi Constituency. However, the Congress with 8 seats extended his government outside support. The government survived just for 49 days. On 14 February 2014, Kejriwal resigned as the Chief Minister after failing to table the Jan Lokpal Bill in the Assembly and recommended the dissolution of the Assembly. 

In 2015 Assembly election, the AAP won a landslide victory winning 67 seats. Kejriwal took oath on 14 February 2015 as Delhi's chief minister for the second time. And in 2020 Assembly election, the APP again secured a massive verdict, winning 62 seats, and Kejriwal becoming the Delhi Chief Minister for the third time in a row, equaling the record of Sheela Dikshit.

 

However, in its attempt to seek a fourth term, the APP suffered a humiliating defeat in the Delhi Assembly election held on 5 February 2025.  It secured just 22 seats, with all its stalwarts including Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia suffering humiliating defeat. The party faces an existential crisis. Though it captured power in Delhi - a city-state- mainly due to the support of the middle class who were part of the anti-corruption movement, it is not a truly political party with organised structure. With the defeat of Kejriwal, his aura has diminished.  What explains the fall from the meteoric rise of Kejriwal?

 

Kejriwal abandoned the very core values that catapulted him into power in the first place.  His once trusted colleagues, who supported and stood by him, like Prashant Bhushan, Yogendra Yadav, Kumar Vishwas and others, were pushed out when he found them inconvenient. His political ambition to become a national leader and a Prime Ministerial candidate made him to resort to unethical practice of admitting corrupt people from rival parties into his party and giving them tickets, like any other party. He lost the moral compass. The AAP has become a one man show, a megalomania who expects unflinching loyalty. How the Delhi Women Commission Chairperson Swati Maliwan was beaten up, ill-treated and humiliated when she visited Kejriwal to meet him at his residence, after he was released on bail, is a pointer.

 

It was his political ambition that explains the alleged Delhi liquor scam. It is alleged the bribe money the AAP got from the liquor scam was used to fight the elections, particularly the Goa Assembly election in 2022. After the Goa election, he was so boastful that the AAP had emerged as a national party, by increasing its vote share and ruling Punjab, besides Delhi. He, along with the top leaders of AAP, Manish Sisodia and Sanjay Singh, were arrested and jailed, and are on bail. It is shocking that the leaders born out of the anti-corruption movement should end up facing serious criminal charges. This eroded the image and credibility of the AAP and its leadership beyond repair.  

Kejriwal comes out as a dishonest and deceptive person, who is good at misleading the people and making false promises. His duplicity and double standards were evident. When the Modi government took away the statehood of Jammu and Kashmir and split the state into two union territories in 2019, he didn’t say a word, particularly when he was all along demanding raising the status of Delhi to a full-fledged state. 

And when the people in Shaheen Bagh Delhi were on the streets protesting against the CAA and the NCR for more than three months from 15 December 2019 till 24 March 2020 (protests suspended following the declaration of a nationwide lock down) and were brutally treated by the police, he didn’t even visit the protesting site, nor offered any support or empathy. He is not secular. That he promised, during the election campaign, to pay monthly salary to the Hindu priests, shows his inclination towards the Hindutva ideology.

 

He may have done some good work in the field of education and public health, but  his misgovernance and incompetence is manifested in  many ways -  piling of garbage on the streets, failure to provide clean tap water, crumbling infrastructure, broken roads, over flowing sewers that were never repaired, rising crime, reducing Delhi to a gas chamber due to toxic air, and failing to clean the Yamuna river, making it one of the most polluted rivers in the world. In other words, Kejriwal failed to address the basic civic issues, in spite of the APP winning the DMC elections, while aspiring to make the APP, that has no ideological clarify and commitment, as a national alternative, replacing the Congress.  

 

The arrogance of invincibility was the undoing of Kejriwal. He was arrested by ED and CBI in the alleged Delhi liquor scam case. The INDIA bloc condemned the Centre for misusing its agencies to get a sitting Chief Minister arrested – first of its kind. However, when he was granted conditional bail by the Supreme Court on 13 September 2024, and was released from the jail, he refused to have any seat-sharing arrangement with the Congress for the Assembly election in Haryana. His party contested all the 90 seats only to win zero seats. The Congress lost to BJP just by a margin of 0.4 vote share (the BJP vote share of 39.9 % as against the Congress vote share of 39.5%).

 

Earlier, the AAP contested against the Congress in the states like Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, MP, Goa, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, where it didn’t have any organisation, cutting into the congress vote share and helping the BJP to win. Even in the recent Delhi Assembly election, he pre-empted the Congress for entering into any seat sharing arrangement by unilaterally announcing that the APP would contest all the seats on its own. 

Had he reached some understanding with the Congress, and offered some respectable number of seats, the election outcome would have been different.  And having refused to resign as the Chief Minister on his arrest, and preferring to work from the jail, and then resigning on the Supreme Court giving him conditional bail, saying that he was resigning to come back as Chief Minister after the election, and then making Atishi as a proxy Chief minister (she refused to occupy the CM chair of Kejriwal) – all this shows his arrogance of invincibility.  

   

However, the BJP winning the Delhi Assembly election is no good news. It won’t address the basic issue of unemployment among the youth. The verdict is against the misgovernance of Kejriwal. The people voted for change. It is not a vindication of Modi’s policies, but a referendum on Kejriwal’s performance. The AAP had won decisively in 2015 and 2020 at the height of Modi’s popularity. This verdict was more about ousting the APP rather than ushering in the BJP. It was a rejection of Kejriwal’s politics of deceit and deception. Just like his meteoric rise to power, his fall is so swift and dramatic. It is the beginning of the end of his political career, his Waterloo.