AAP rift: Expelled Yadav, Bhushan turn up the heat, but does anyone really care?

AAP may have decimated the Congress in the Delhi assembly elections, but Rahul got a little bit of revenge yesterday. He completely stole the limelight from what was a very dramatic day in the Aam Aadmi Party. In a final decisive blow, AAP expelled rebel leaders Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan along with two others for ‘anti-party activities’. But in what should have been a day of sound and fury, it was #Rahulroars that dominated public mind space, at least if social media is any indication. [caption id=“attachment_2204924” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Image from IBNlive[/caption] The completely unexpected attack on the BJP in the Lok Sabha by the usually inarticulate Rahul, who not only did not blunder but went on to coin the very catchy ‘suit-boot ka sarkar’ to describe the Modi government, meant that AAP, who are usually the kings of hashtag mountain, floundered in Rahul’s wake. Granted, the news broke late at night, but as of 9 am this morning, it was still the #Rahulroars hashtag that dominated, along with a secondary #Pappumeows trend that was started by stunned BJP supporters late in the evening. It was only after Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav came out and spoke to the media much later, that any buzz started picking up. But it took Bhushan to make statements like ‘AAP is Khap’ for that to happen. And even then, the trending hashtag right now is #AAPbreakup. This trend of little to no coverage was also carried over in the newspapers this morning. The AAP news made page one in Times of India, but as a tiny single column that continued on an inside page, while there was no mention of the news on the Indian Express front page at all. And it was the same story on television. All the footage was of Rahul’s Lok Sabha speech and the reactions to it on either side of the divide, at least until Bhushan and Yadav’s speeches, which were suitably angry and disappointed. This effectively meant that for a whole day, the expulsion - Kejriwal’s final triumph over Yadav and Bhushan - was relegated to the status of ’that also happened’ with Rahul being the focus. But in all honesty, Kejriwal would not have minded the attention shift. The prolonged battle between the AAP leader and Yadav and Bhushan has not painted him in a very positive light. He has been called a dictator who does not tolerate dissent, he has been caught on tape abusing two of his erstwhile colleagues, and AAP’s critics have used the incident to call him a power hungry hypocrite. It also effectively means that Yadav and Bhushan’s time in the limelight is officially over. They may have provided a lot of the ideology and vision of AAP, but the fact remains that neither have the personality or political acumen to make it without the party. The brutal truth is that without AAP they are more or less relegated to Delhi drawing room intellectuals with no broader base or appeal. As pointed out by Firstpost editor Sandipan Sharma, Kejriwal’s rise as a mass leader who no longer needs his volunteers has meant that neither Yadav nor Bhushan has the ability to pressurise him in any way. “Kejriwal isn’t worried about slogans like internal democracy, samvad, idealism or transparency any more. He knows that his future depends on the performance of his government and the reaction of voters in Delhi, not on the mood of  volunteers in Maharashtra or some other state. Volunteers outside Delhi, as far as Kejriwal is concerned, can go home. In the end, Yadav and Bhushan will neither be able to reform the party nor split it to form a viable alternative to AAP. They will, unfortunately, have no other option but to walk into the sunset of politics”. Yadav seems oddly resigned to this fate. Finally given his moment to speak, he told television reporters this morning that “maybe this is the beginning of a new and beautiful journey”. Whatever else it may be, it’s certainly the end of his stint in politics.