Why I
Lost Faith in Arvind Kejriwal
Written
by Dr. Seshadri Kumar, 10 April, 2014
Copyright © Dr. Seshadri Kumar. All Rights Reserved.
Disclaimer: All the opinions expressed in this article are
the opinions of Dr. Seshadri Kumar alone and should not be construed to mean
the opinions of any other person or organization, unless explicitly stated
otherwise in the article.
*********************************
The
Anna Hazare Movement – A Turning Point
I started this blog in August 2011. I owe my political consciousness today to
Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement of August 2011. Until then, I was a mobile vegetable like most
other Indians, content to go to my office, do my work, get my salary, watch cricket
matches on TV, and see Bollywood movies, but never motivated enough to use the
brain I had to think in detail about the kind of society we live in.
Like most Indians, I had a “chalta hai” attitude. I used to see the news about some economic
policy or other, or some political development, and then drop the paper after a
little while and go back to being self-absorbed. If I had to deal with a government office,
some friend would guide me on whom to talk to so that I could get the necessary
work done with the appropriate amount of grease money; I never thought much
about it except that this is the way it is in India.
I had no real interest in analyzing the conflicting claims
of different candidates and different parties; I had never thought much about
whether capitalism was better or socialism was, beyond the sound bites I used
to hear. One day one commentator seemed
to make sense; another day a different commentator made sense; and, in any
case, it was more important to know if India could win the match and to know how
many runs were left for us to clinch a victory, so I would change the channel. I knew little about article 370, and vaguely
remembered details of the Shah Bano case from my growing-up years.
I had lived in the US too, and while I used
to follow presidential debates and political analysis on TV channels there, my
mind rarely rose to examine things in a serious way. As with most ordinary folk, the simplest
explanations made the most sense to me then, with the result that I thought all
the policies of the Democratic party were correct as they seemed to care for
the guy on the street (the “aam aadmi”of America.)
The Anna Hazare-led India Against Corruption movement
changed all that. I was transfixed by
the sight of an septuagenerian going on a hunger strike to protest against
corruption in India. Like most people in
India, I was energized. I was living in
Pune at the time, and even participated in a rally in support of the Jan Lokpal
bill.
Starting
Leftbrainwave and Songs on Youtube
I wanted the movement to succeed; but I knew that my
strengths were not in organizing political movements on the ground. I could write, though, and so I thought my
contribution to the success of the movement would be to write about it.
So I started this blog; and in a series of articles, I
supported the IAC movement. I first
wrote an article
talking about how criticism of Anna’s movement as “unconstitutional,” claims that it
was tantamount to “blackmailing the government,” and accusations that he was being
disrespectful of the constitution, and so on, were baseless; wrote about my
feelings on the day Anna was released from jail, which were simply a
reflection of what most Indians were feeling that day; talked about the biased
coverage of the movement in Indian cable channels; discussed
the nature of the opposition to Anna Hazare’s movement among intellectuals,
more
than once; compiled
information on the support for Anna Hazare in protest marches throughout India
to counter the propaganda that this was a movement limited to urban
middle-class people; criticized
an article in the Wall Street Journal which claimed that the Anna Hazare
movement could not be compared to the Arab Spring; wrote articles
in support of the movement when it was criticized for being disrespectful to
parliamentarians; wrote articles
in support of Kiran Bedi and Om Puri when they were threatened with privilege
motions by members of Parliament for criticizing the government; and even wrote
a celebratory article when parliament agreed to a “sense of the House”
resolution agreeing to Anna Hazare’s three main demands.
I was even energized enough to compose a song in support of the Jan Lokpal movement and sing the song, which I wrote originally in Hindi (based on the Golmaal title song featuring Amol Palekar), and then translated into Tamil and Telugu as well. And I was not even part of the India Against Corruption organization! I was simply doing this on my own initiative, because I liked what they were doing. (Just to clarify: I have never been part of the AAP either; all my support for either IAC or AAP has been from the outside.)
But today, I am writing to tell you that I do not
support Arvind Kejriwal or the Aam Aadmi Party.
I will not vote for them.
What has changed in my view?
Why did a person, who has spent so much energy and passion supporting
Anna Hazare, as well as Arvind Kejriwal and the others who formed the core of
IAC and went on to form the AAP, decide they were not good for India’s
future? Read on to understand the
reasons.
“Anti-Corruption”
Does Not Make a Party
About a year after their highly-successful and visible
anti-corruption campaign in August 2011, Team Anna completely
disintegrated. I have written in detail
on how and why this disintegration happened in a summary
article a year after the August 2011 protests. Essentially, by this point, one year after
their great success, the Anna movement had lost all steam, was unable to draw
any crowds in their rallies; and their repeated fasts were losing their sheen,
so much so that those involved in the fasts had to give excuses to terminate
the fasts so as not to die an ignoble death.
While people were writing off the IAC as a footnote in India’s
political history, Arvind Kejriwal sought to reinvent himself by transforming
IAC into a political party, the Aam Aadmi Party. I was not delighted by this development, as I
felt they should focus on their core competency, which was to be a pressure
group to achieve an objective, not a political party which required core competencies
in several areas, for which they were not equipped. As I wrote in my summary
article on the IAC movement,
A movement can be based on a single issue; a political party
cannot. A political party HAS to have a position on every major issue
facing the nation: foreign policy – whether to align with the US, with Russia,
or China on any issue; what to do about our nuclear capability; whether to
further implement the US-India nuclear agreement; whether to allow FDI in
multi-brand retail; whether to take any action against the Sri Lankan
government for attacking Tamil fishermen; whether to build roads in Arunachal
Pradesh to match the Chinese level of development on the border; whether to
implement more or less reservation in education and jobs; how to accelerate the
pace of infrastructure building in the country; what kind of economic
liberalization measures needs to be undertaken in the country; how to make
Indian education more effective, and to create students who not only finish
school, but actually possess skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic; how to
effectively realize the benefits of India’s demographic dividend; how to
eliminate the corrosive effects of casteism in India and to truly raise the
living conditions of the poorest of the poor; how to resolve the border
conflicts with Pakistan and China; and a hundred other such crucial and
pressing issues.
Team Anna neither has the experience nor the ability to deal with most
of these issues. The key attribute of most of their principals, as has
already been highlighted above, was an unassailable integrity. While they
were great leaders in a campaign for probity in public life, it would be too
much to expect them to have answers to all these questions.
Inflexibility and an Inability to Achieve Consensus
Another reality about the IAC/AAP
people that I had begun to notice after a year of following them was that they
were not willing to accommodate diversity of opinion. This had been pointed out quite early in the
movement’s history, as far back as August 2011, by commentators, but I was too
taken in by the movement’s dynamism to take those criticisms seriously. In fact, I wrote a rebuttal to it in my very
first blog article, on the “misinformation
in the media about the Anna Hazare movement”:
Anna's proposed Jan lokpal bill has been
out in the open for 8 months. The reasoning behind the bill has been
publicly explained by them and debated all this time. The bill has
received intense scrutiny and discussion in the media over this time and the
team has received 1300 suggestions from various people that they have
incorporated into it, according to Arvind Kejriwal who stated this in an
interview on TV with Karan Thapar. The current version of their jan
lokpal bill, according to Arvind Kejriwal, is the 13th. In contrast, how
open has the govt's bill been? Did they consult anyone except themselves?
It is clear to everyone except those who do not wish to see that Anna
Hazare's people are open to valid criticism of their bill and are willing to
change the draft if a valid objection to it is raised.
Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan have
made it clear in interviews on several TV channels that they are open to
modifying the draft. A debate in parliament, if conducted in good faith,
taking Anna's bill as a base, and then modifying it suitably, will, I am sure,
not be objectionable to anyone in the Anna camp.
Anna's public stubbornness should be seen
for what it really is: a negotiating tactic. I am sure he is willing to
negotiate with the govt., but do you really expect him to announce that on
national TV and reveal his hand when the govt has not made any conciliatory
overtures? But his team has made it clear that while they are willing to
negotiate, the negotiation is about issues like implementation, etc., not about
corruption or about leaving some people out of the ambit of the bill. I
think this should be viewed as reasonable; the aim of the lokpal is to
eliminate corruption; how can you negotiate on corruption? The govt.
continues to be stubborn and sound like a stuck record; but I don't see
commentators talking about how the govt. is behaving in a high-handed and
dictatorial manner, and how it completely is ignoring the wishes of the people!
Sadly, I was wrong
and the commentators I was rebutting were right. Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, and the rest of
the team made it clear, time and again, that they would accept ONLY their
version of the Jan Lokpal; that any additions, omissions, or modifications
suggested even by prominent social activists like Aruna Roy and Jayaprakash
Narayan would not be acceptable to them.
I had high hopes that they would conduct a national debate on the Lokpal
Bill and, in consultation with the other civic society members, present a
unified bill that truly represented the views of the people in the interests of
the people. Anyone who raised an
objection that the proposed Lokpal of the IAC might be too powerful for India’s
good was immediately shot down as someone in cahoots with the corrupt
politicians.
This same tendency
carried over to the AAP that was born from the ashes of the IAC. During the 49 days that Arvind Kejriwal was
CM of Delhi, the party would not listen to any objection to any of its
proposals. It was always my way or the
highway.
The Problem with the Basic Premise – the Genesis
of Corruption
As I kept discussing
these ideas with friends, reading more literature, and writing articles on the
subject, one thing became clear to me – that first IAC, and then AAP, was
mistaken in understanding the core issues of corruption and how it happens. I realized that the Lokpal does not really
address the root cause of corruption.
Let me explain this.
The root cause of
corruption is discretionary power.
Politicians are able to demand bribes for decisions that they can take
because they are entrusted with too much discretionary power. The best way to remove corruption is to remove
the discretionary power that lies with politicians.
Asking for a Lokpal while allowing politicians to have discretionary power is akin to asking a wolf to guard sheep and then having a committee to punish the wolf after it has eaten a few sheep: you are asking to have a policeman to punish the erring wolf, but not solving the root problem, which is that you should never put a wolf in charge of guarding sheep.
Asking for a Lokpal while allowing politicians to have discretionary power is akin to asking a wolf to guard sheep and then having a committee to punish the wolf after it has eaten a few sheep: you are asking to have a policeman to punish the erring wolf, but not solving the root problem, which is that you should never put a wolf in charge of guarding sheep.
In the same way, the
resources of the nation should not be in the control of politicians. Remove discretionary power, and the
politicians cannot be corrupt even if they want to be. As long as the government retains significant
control of resources, they will continue to have discretion in how to use those
resources. The only way to remove their
discretionary powers is to end their ownership of state resources. In other words, privatize.
This will require
large-scale disinvestment (at good market values) of most of India’s
infrastructure, such as oil and gas, minerals and mining, ports, energy,
railways, and the like. Except for a few
critical, national-security-related industries like defense, most industry
needs to be privatized for government corruption to end.
In addition, even
for things that need to be under the control of government, there are too many
hoops for people to go through. For a
business to start in India, there are dozens of clearances that it has to
obtain, and each clearance means a bribe to a different officer. This maze of regulations needs to be greatly
simplified – and a Lokpal will not solve it.
This does not mean
that there should be no regulations.
There should be regulations, but they should pertain to performance, not
permits; and they should be streamlined.
For example, if someone wishes to set up a power plant, they should not
have to submit a proposal and hope for a subjective approval; instead, the
guidelines for a power plant should be openly and clearly published on a
website – what kind of environmental impacts are allowed, what kind of
resources can be granted, and so on, and if an agency wishes to set up a power
plant, all that should be needed is a check that they have fulfilled all the
necessary requirements, which does not even need to be done by the government itself,
but by a third party regulator – in the same way that the government itself
does not scrutinize the balance sheets of companies – that job is done by
independent auditors like KPMG
or E&Y. The role of government should be limited to
setting the standards and nothing more. This will eliminate government corruption in
one fell swoop.
Further, the Lokpal
will put a much greater strain on the already-overloaded judicial system of India,
which has arrears of decades. Indian
courts are poorly staffed and even high-profile cases like the 1993 Mumbai
blasts take 20 years to be decided – and that is a case where 350 people
died. So the demand for a Jan Lokpal is
poorly thought through, and there are more effective remedies for corruption.
It certainly isn’t worth giving up
elected office for.
Hit-and-Run Politics and U-Turns
Having formed the
Aam Aadmi Party, Mr. Kejriwal, in an attempt to stay in the limelight, publicly
proclaimed that he would expose the corruption of the major parties. One week one heard that he had exposed the illegal
land deals of Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Congress President Sonia Gandhi,
in Haryana and Rajasthan; another week one heard that he was exposing
the illegal affairs of Nitin Gadkari, at the time the BJP President, in
diverting water meant for poor farmers to rich industrialists; a third week he
would talk about Union Minister Salman
Khurshid embezzling funds from his trust where he supposedly donates free
wheelchairs; and the fourth week one heard that he was exposing
industrialist Mukesh Ambani for corruption in gas pricing. In none of the cases did he stay the course
long enough for an investigation to be completed and the accused to be
proclaimed guilty. For all the
allegations, Mr.
Kejriwal did not even press a single criminal case. The popular perception was simply that he was
doing all this to stay in the limelight.
The impression was firmly that of a dilettante rather than a serious
politician.
In addition, Mr.
Kejriwal, whose IAC had been on fairly friendly terms with the BJP when he was
associated with Anna Hazare, suddenly developed a severe antipathy for the BJP
when he had formed the AAP. Although
initially he stuck to the script and said that both national parties were
corrupt, the anti-Congress talk quickly evaporated and all criticism was
directed at the BJP.
As if this were not
enough, the man who had made his political life on the basis of an
anti-corruption campaign suddenly started claiming that corruption was now a secondary concern and that the primary focus of the AAP should be
fighting communalism, a veiled reference to the BJP, whom he was accusing
of being communal.
In line with this
changed focus were several photo-ops, wherein Kejriwal
was seen with fundamentalist Muslim clerics, praying at mosques, and
circulating pamphlets exhorting the Muslim community in Delhi to vote for the
AAP, for which Mr.
Kejriwal was pulled up by the election commission for model code violations.
This sudden change
in emphasis was extremely puzzling to most people and gave them the impression
that Mr. Kejriwal was as opportunistic a politician as the ones he liked to
criticize.
The Delhi Fiasco
Despite all these
misgivings about the AAP and their central election plank, viz., the Jan Lokpal
Bill, I was still optimistic when
the AAP actually won 28 seats in the Delhi assembly polls and were offered
the chance to form a government in Delhi.
Despite my understanding of their past inflexibility, as discussed
above, I still had hope that they would see their mission as broader than just
the Jan Lokpal bill; that they would understand why a state like Delhi could
benefit greatly from people who are genuinely interested in doing good; and
that Lokpal bill or not, here was a chance to demonstrate to the world how
clean, good governance was achievable in India.
There was some
drama about this, and I
wrote with much concern at the time, urging the party to take up the reins
of power in order to make a difference – with a warning that failure to do so
would doom them to irrelevance, much as failure to take the best offer from the
UPA government at the height of the IAC’s influence doomed it to irrelevance.
To my relief, the AAP
agreed to take up governance in Delhi.
I was, by this time, not a big fan of the party, because of various
pro-socialist statements from key people in their party – recall that I believe
socialism is a pathway to corruption as it strengthens the discretionary powers
of the state – but I still wanted them to succeed in Delhi to set an example
for the entire country as to how a clean administration can deliver.
Unfortunately, the
AAP disappointed again. In their brief,
49-day government, the party preferred to court controversy rather than focus
on serving the people. Their manifesto
talked about issues for which they needed support from the Congress and BJP
parties, as well as issues over which they needed no support whatsoever. Examples of the former were a
demand to have the law-and-order framework entirely under the control of the
Delhi state government and the
passage of the Jan Lokpal bill. Both
of these required the central parliament to act in cooperation with the Delhi
government, and the AAP government did not get the necessary cooperation.
But they knew that
this was the case when they assumed power – that they could not expect a lot of
cooperation from either of the national parties, especially on matters which
needed to be settled in the Lok Sabha (powers of the Delhi state, for
example.) There were still a lot of
issues on which a clean and sincere government could do much, and the AAP
started a lot of initiatives, but was unable to complete anything because they
ruled for so short a time. For instance,
an initiative they undertook was to try to make
arrangements for homeless people to sleep in a makeshift shelter during the
harsh Delhi winter. This is a laudable
initiative, and had the AAP government stayed its course, it might have well
been able to deliver.
Another initiative
floated by the AAP was to provide
toilets in all public schools and to increase the number of schools. A third initiative was to rationalize
the price of water and electricity, for which they promised to conduct an audit
of the utilities to determine if corruption had been occurring, and if so,
what would be the correct pricing for these utilities.
While these were all
worthy initiatives, and I wish the AAP had pursued a lot more of these, they
quit within 49 days over the fact that they did not get cooperation in passing
their pet Jan Lokpal bill. Immediately
after the bill was defeated, Kejriwal announced that he was quitting the
government. The same inflexibility they
had shown earlier was continuing to dog them.
Mr. Kejriwal
announced his party’s resignation from power without so much as a thought for
the millions who had backed him. In
particular, he had exhorted people in Delhi to not pay electricity dues,
arguing that the rates people were being charged were too high, and that when
he came to power he would see to it that the rates were revised down with
retroactive effect. About 24,000 people
defaulted on their bills as a result of his exhortation. Well, he did come to power, and
he did reduce the rates, which in itself was controversial, because it
meant that only those who had supported him availed of the subsidy – clear
nepotism and a violation of equality under the law – and attracted
widespread criticism. The move was
also criticized as financially irresponsible because it was not based
on any careful financial analysis but populism. The final goof-up in this massive exercise in
stupidity was that he
did not make any provision for the Rs. 6 crore subsidy in Delhi’s budget, as a
result of which the subsidy lapsed.
For me, personally, Kejriwal's resignation was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Here was an opportunity to do so much for a city state like Delhi, and
here were people who were willing to give up ALL this for one single
issue. That was what proved to me that
this was an impractical bunch of people who could never achieve anything –
never, at any rate, as long as Mr. Kejriwal was their leader.
Whenever I walk
around Mumbai, or Pune, or Bangalore, or any other city I have either lived in
or visited, I think of how much I could do to change the place if only I had
the authority. How, even if I had a
portfolio generally considered “unimportant,” such as tourism, I could make a
difference. For instance, when I visited
Delhi a few years ago, I had the chance to visit Humayun’s tomb, a world
heritage site. For all its billing, the
site had very little help for the tourist.
There was very little signage telling you what you were looking at. I remember how tourist sites in the west are
so well-developed. As I was standing in
Humayun’s tomb, I was thinking of all the things I could do to make it a truly
world-class tourist site.
And this is just
about one small, fairly unimportant issue – but something that can have a huge
domino effect. Think of all the things
one can do to make things better when one has control of an entire city-state –
schools, public transport, water, electricity, food supply, hygiene, hospitals –
the list is endless. The AAP had that
power and control. They chose to throw
away this opportunity on this single prestige issue. That is what tells me these people – and especially
their leader, Arvind Kejriwal – are not serious about providing good governance. And I would never entrust such a party with
the affairs of the entire country when they cannot manage to run a city.
Mr. Kejriwal seems
more concerned about grandstanding and about winning seats in the Lok Sabha. In a recent debate on facebook, one
of their party volunteers proudly informed me that “quitting Delhi was a
planned strategy and well-scripted.” I
asked him if they had told the people of Delhi about their plan to quit the
administration within 2 months if elected.
Had they told them this truth, would they have gotten their 28 seats? This shows that the AAP betrayed the people
of Delhi; that they never had any intention to govern if elected, but were only
using the Delhi election as a springboard to the national elections.
By acting in these
ways, the AAP has proved that it doesn’t embody a different kind of politics,
as they have been claiming all along.
They are (at least their leaders are) as cynical as the worst political
party, and their so-called “sacrifice” of power in Delhi was simply a gambit to
get more power at the national level.
Their leaders are as power-hungry as those from the worst political
party, and the mask of righteousness has finally been torn off their face.
Concluding Thoughts
The citizen’s
movement that started with Anna Hazare’s “Indian Monsoon” movement in August
2011 has run its full course. The
movement began well, and had the salutary effect of awakening the Indian
citizen to the awareness that he or she needed to be actively engaged in the
politics of the nation; that he or she could not blindly entrust the politics
of the nation to its politicians and simply vote once in 5 years and expect
things to be fine. The citizen has to be
an active participant in the politics of the nation. This realization is certainly a strong
positive outcome of the movement of Anna Hazare.
However, the party
that has sprung from this movement, the Aam Aadmi Party, has failed the people. The party has betrayed both the people of
Delhi who elected it to power, as well as its own volunteers, many of whom left
lucrative jobs in a spirit of service to do good for the nation.
I don’t believe,
however, that the idea of the AAP is dead.
The idea that the common people of the country should get together to
form honest parties that aim to do good for the country has now been
established as a credible alternative reality.
Unfortunately, this particular incarnation of the idea has failed, due
to flawed, egotistical, and obstinate leaders like Mr. Kejriwal who have put
their own ego ahead of the well-being of the party.
There is no reason
why a different incarnation of a people’s party, composed of ordinary Indians
unconnected with political parties and big money, should not work. We should be thankful to the AAP that it
showed that one can win an election without being well-connected and
well-funded, and can still win 29% vote share in an election such as the Delhi
assembly. They have broken new ground
and shown people that this is possible.
However, two
important requirements have been shown to be very essential by the experience
of the AAP, and any future party should clarify these before engaging in a
similar endeavour as the AAP.
One of the major
flaws of the AAP is that they were a single-issue party that was only concerned
about corruption. Any viable political
party should have a detailed internal manifesto on all major issues that all
party members must be in agreement on – religious affairs, economic direction,
industrial policy, defence, urban development, natural resources, environment,
and the like - else there will be conflict on the party direction. The AAP’s brief history clearly illustrates
the importance of such an internal manifesto.
Having such a manifesto would have prevented embarrassments like
Prashant Bhushan shooting off his mouth on Kashmir.
The second
requirement is the need for educated followers of a new party like the AAP to
be independently aware – to study issues independently, and to form their own
opinions. One of the signal flaws that I
noticed in the party was that most of the people were simply following the
leader, viz., Kejriwal. They had little
independent thought, and were simply parroting their leader’s statements on facebook
and twitter. How different is this from
the hundreds of illiterates who follow a Lalu Prasad Yadav or a Mayawati? Most of the AAP volunteers are educated; but
this education seems to have done little to awaken their own desire to be
informed participants of a democracy and a democratic party. Unless Indians start to think independently,
the future is bleak. It is time to get
rid of your intellectual laziness; otherwise, just as your father’s generation
was exploited by leaders like Lalu, Nitish, and Mayawati, your generation will
be exploited by self-servers like Kejriwal.
It might seem to you
that I am writing the obituary of the Aam Aadmi Party. If so, you would not be mistaken. I don’t expect this party to be viable for
much longer after the general election.
But the death of the AAP might well be the start of a new
beginning. The countless volunteers who
have supported this party and contributed to its growth will not quietly fade
away. Their desire for a better India
will find a new, and hopefully a less egotistic and a more coherent voice for
expression. It is a vision one earnestly
hopes does translate one day into a reality.
