You would have thought that water alone has the anomalous property of expanding when frozen. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal displays a similar propensity. He “expands” where others would retreat. The more the media mocks and berates him and tries to put him in the deep freeze, the fierier he comes out. In this regard, he is somewhat like Donald Trump, but the similarity ends here. Unlike the flashy billionaire who loves the good things of life, Kejriwal is a middle-class family man, happy with his vegetarian meal and cough syrup. As the US president seeks to discard the pro-poor healthcare and moves to auction away public spaces of learning and education, Kejriwal veers closer to the old-fashioned economics that harks back to India’s early quest to become a welfare state. Unlike most of his competitors Kejriwal revels in his hostility to crony capitalism, which he believes has stunted India’s growth. He was likened to Pakistan’s Imran Khan. That was unintelligent. If anything, Imran veers closer to the BJP’s politics of riding religious identity. Would he be able to say, for example, “I will never use religion to win an election even if I have to lose a 100 times”? That’s what Kejriwal said publicly when the BJP won Uttar Pradesh in a polarised election.
Some events more readily set him apart from his rivals. When mobs attacked Muslims in BJP-ruled Haryana, Kejriwal dispatched a fact-finding team to the neighbouring state. In 2015, Haryana chief minister M.L. Khattar reportedly asked Muslims to leave the country unless they gave up eating beef, a claim he later denied. “Khattar sahib should resign… His statement is not only unfortunate, but shameful”, Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party said. He set up a special investigation team to revisit the Sikh massacre of 1984. When Hindutva mobs vandalised churches in Delhi, it was the AAP that led the face-off with the communalists. The more Kejriwal’s rivals throw muck at him, the cleaner he looks. How many times has the Delhi Police picked up his MLAs for this or that alleged crime only to be rapped on the knuckles by the courts? By a quirk of logic, the Delhi government has no control on the city’s police who fall under federal supervision. Even the chief minister’s offices were not spared from being raided by the agencies. They only got frustration to show for their heavily publicised efforts. The anomalous rise of Kejriwal persists with its perverse logic. In 2013, according to an English daily, the Congress government moved to probe alleged foreign funding to Kejriwal’s party. The following day, the daily donation to the AAP increased six-fold. Kejriwal thanked the BJP and the Congress for the windfall.
I have met Kejriwal once for five seconds at a public event where I thought of giving him a book on corporate corruption. He may never have needed it actually, because it turned out that he knew more than the book could reveal. I am told he is allergic to leftists, which is not strange since the left has vainly put up candidates against him. But then, what is a former Maoist doing in his cabinet? There must be some meeting of the minds. Easily the single-most important factor shoring up Kejriwal’s pronounced secularism is Ashish Khetan. This journalist-turned-politician carried out the most damaging exposés on Hindutva fanaticism in Gujarat during Prime Minister Modi’s tenure as the state’s chief minister. Last week, the Modi government through the lieutenant governor shut down the AAP party office in Delhi claiming it did not have official clearances. Kejriwal was the first to stall the Modi juggernaut in Delhi. In response, the prime minister, that for the first time in Delhi municipality’s history, has staked his reputation to defeat Kejriwal. But in Kejriwal’s case when he loses, he wins.
By arrangement with Dawn
