AAP love story is over: Kejriwal turned out to be worse than VP Singh

He rose on the political sky like a new star of hope. In the run up to the election, he was euphemistically called the man of the masses, the ‘taqdeer’ of the nation. During the campaign, he claimed to have details of the Swiss bank accounts of the high and mighty in his diary and promised to eradicate corruption from the roots. The minorities flocked to him; the middle-class loved him; the youth dreamt of a revolution when he spoke and the poor believed he was their messiah. Riding on the euphoria, the promise of a new dawn, the two-year-old party decimated its rivals and formed the next government in Delhi. [caption id=“attachment_2150127” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The mask has slipped off: PTI[/caption] It was meant to be a new beginning. But it turned out to be the beginning of the end. Soon, the government turned into a never-ending drama full of conspiracies, betrayals, back-stabbing, ego clashes, damning revelations and ugly wars among its top leaders. Sounds like the story of Arvind Kejriwal and his ugly circus? Yes, it does. But this is a story of VP Singh and his government; the saga of yet another politician who flattered India only to deceive it later. Had former Prime Minister Singh been still alive, he would have seen striking similarities between himself and Kejriwal—from the beginning to the unfolding end. Had this not been real, Singh may have even been led to believe that his own biopic is now being played out in Kejriwal’s theatre of the absurd. A recurring theme of Indian politics has been that every few years a new politician catches the fancy of the nation. He rails against the establishment, promises to fight against the corrupt and dynastic Congress, packages himself as honest and holier-than-thou, sells dreams of better days, makes promises that sound sincere, coins catchy slogans— Raja (VP Singh) Nahin Fakir Hai, Desh ki Taqdeer Hai, for instance — and then walks away with the trust and hopes of the voters. And just when, after having invested heavily in the new neta on the block and as people wait for him to deliver, the bubble bursts. Either the politicians start fighting with each other—VP Singh vs Devi Lal vs Chandrashekhar vs Arun Nehru was a recurring theme during the Janata Dal government— or their mask comes off and they are revealed to be frauds and power-grabbers masquerading as fakir or aam aadmi for power. Like VP Singh, and before him the Janata Party and Rajiv Gandhi, Kejriwal and his entourage have yet again proved that hope in Indian politics is transient. In the end, as people are fond of saying, all of them are the same. The biggest difference between VP Singh and Kejriwal is that the former prime minister became a victim of his own circumstances. He suffered not only because of the friction within his own party but also due to the various forces pulling him in different directions from outside. Within the party, Chandrashekhar never liked Singh— he was deceived into believing that Devi Lal would become the PM instead of Raja Manda at the first meeting of the victorious MPs - the Haryanvi leader saw himself almost as an equal and was always conniving to dethrone Singh. Outside, the BJP was raising the temperature on Ram Mandir much to the discomfort of the ‘secular’ PM and his communist allies. On the sidelines, the Congress—the single -largest party in spite of the loss— was stoking internal differences and widening the rifts between allies of the ruling coalition to re-launch its bid for power. From the very beginning, Singh found himself in a snake-pit, with pythons waiting at the exit. In a desperate bid to save his chair, Singh, who had packaged himself as a mendicant who would readily sacrifice power, unleashed the Mandal Commission, sacked Devi Lal and some other colleagues and then clung on to the job even after the BJP withdrew support to his government. In the end, people never forgave Singh for his greed for power and the havoc he unleashed in its pursuit. Perhaps Singh would have acted differently if he had, like Kejriwal, got a brute majority and the politics of his time had not come under strain because of the Ram Mandir agitation. In the end, the attenuating circumstances contributed to his downfall. But Kejriwal had it made. There were no external pressures on him, no social or communal divisions threatened to test his acumen and his deputy — unlike an ambitious and egoistic Devi Lal— appeared to be his yes man. Yet, Kejriwal and his party are on the brink of implosion; their goodwill has disappeared and the mask has slipped off. There is just one person to be blamed for this slide: Kejriwal. Shazia Ilmi says the Delhi chief minister is insecure, power-hungry and thinks only about himself. Till a few days ago, nobody would have believed Shazia, but now the evidence, including allegations of Kejriwal’s efforts to divide the Congress to rule Delhi, is compelling especially given the latest allegations by a former Aam Aadmi Party legislator accusing Kejriwal of trying to poach six Congress MLAs to form the government and former Congress legislator Asif Mohammad Khan alleging that senior AAP leader Sanjay Singh had offered him a ministerial berth in return for support. Kejriwal seems to have several fatal flaws. His insistence on retaining the AAP convener’s post (even Sonia Gandhi and Narendra Modi never enjoyed two positions), his inability to act like an unbiased leader and instead play petty power games like a faction leader or restrain his colleagues from fighting puerile battles in public are as serious as his intransigence to adhere to principles of internal democracy, and his predilection for sycophants and impatience. He seems to be in a hurry to do everything: form the government, quit, contest polls, and oust colleagues all at the same time. And these have all combined to bring about his precipitous decline.