More than many: Kejriwal’s mistakes
The Delhi chief minister’s blunders have weakened him to the point that the ruling BJP feels his arrest won’t backfire in the polls
Legal issues aside, the stunning incarceration of a sitting chief minister makes you wonder: does the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) not fear that the arrest could backfire, create a sympathy wave in favour of Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)?
Clearly, the BJP has calculated that any sympathy wave will be manageable. It is not just that the BJP is all-powerful today but also that Kejriwal is not as popular as he could have been.
The Aam Aadmi Party was formed 11 years ago, in November 2012. In these 11 years, Kejriwal has committed several political blunders, such as becoming chief minister of Delhi when he should have worked to win a Lok Saha seat and entered national politics, and contesting Varanasi against Narendra Modi instead of Amethi against Rahul Gandhi in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
The sacking of Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav from the party converted AAP’s image overnight from a broadspectrum social force to one man’s private fiefdom.
Kejriwal, too busy chasing political dreams, didn’t want to do the hard work of building a party organisation. AAP, much like other non-BJP parties, is an army without soldiers. Today BJP workers can go door-to-door across the country persuading voters that Kejriwal’s arrest is a strong crackdown on corruption and not motivated by politics. AAP doesn’t have workers to counter this narrative.
Kejriwal’s state-by-state approach to national politics also proved ineffective and the Punjab defeat in 2017 set the party’s plans back by a few years. Ideological vacillation further eroded its credibility.
Excessive negative campaigning
What worked for Kejriwal with the Lokpal movement is that he didn’t just point to a problem (corruption) but offered a solution (a new law). Thereafter he won Delhi by saying that he would solve the problem of inflated electricity bills — which he did. But in his efforts to expand nationally, he took a wrong turn, focusing mostly on negative campaigning, over-the-top Modi bashing, and Congress bashing.
His deputy, Manish Sisodia, gave the AAP a new narrative, one of focusing on education and health. Kejriwal himself appropriated this narrative only when it seemed to work. This came to be known as the “Delhi Model” and helped the AAP finally win Punjab in 2021. Once again, positive campaigning worked. But after Sisodia’s arrest in February 2023, Kejriwal was back to negative campaigning. He should have stuck to what was working best for him — education and health. This would have kept his public ratings high and perhaps prevented his arrest for the fear that jail could make him a martyr. But Kejriwal chose politicking instead of “Delhi model of development”.
Kejriwal began his political innings by projecting himself as an outsider who wanted to change the system. He called himself an “Aam Aadmi”, the common man. But he ended up becoming more of a politician than most politicians.