AAP’S ‘HOT’ WAR STRATEGY
Arvind Kejriwal and team give their signature dharna politics a break and return to their desks, but the simmering hostilities with the Lt Governor—and the Centre—are far from over
Has the party’s nine-day sit-in at the L-G’s residence brought to the fore the capital’s problems? Or was it all just ‘dharna’ politics?
Now that a truce has been reached between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the bureaucrats who ostensibly work for them, will it be business as usual in Delhi? That is, a resumption of simmering hostilities between the elected government and Lt Governor Anil Baijal—a central government stooge, the AAP maintains?
It had been an hallucinatory nine days, seeing Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal stretched out on a sofa in an antechamber of the L-G’s residence. Seeing deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and health minister Satyendar Jain embark on hunger strikes. A melodramatic gesture, critics sniffed, as both men were rushed to hospital. Seeing a variety of leaders, from Mamata Banerjee to Chandrababu Naidu to Pinarayi Vijayan, Sitaram Yechury, Akhilesh Yadav and political neophyte Kamal Haasan, express their support for Kejriwal, making him relevant again at a time when he was in danger of becoming a running joke—the Chihuahua forever nipping at the Great Dane.
AAP has claimed these nine days as a victory. Columnist and social commentator Santosh Desai describes the sit-in as a “risky but strategically sound move”. It turned what had been an “attritional cold war”, he argues, “into a hot war”. In other words, AAP forced a lancing of the boil. According to Atishi Marlena, a senior AAP functionary who has done widely acclaimed work in improving Delhi’s schools, the so-called dharna was “important” as a means to highlight how the “L-G’s office is being misused by the Centre”. She believes a significant proportion of Delhi’s voters understand that “the AAP government’s work is being disrupted, that though we have been effective, we could have been exponentially more effective had we been free of impediments”.
This, of course, is an impossible proposition to prove. Some, like three-time Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, scoff at the idea. Her government, she told reporters, demanded full statehood for Delhi but she didn’t use it as a political fig leaf. “We didn’t make it an excuse,” she said, “for not carrying out developmental work.” She pointed out that the BJP was in power at the Centre when she was chief minister in 1998 and that she had been able to achieve her aims without unnecessary confrontation. A charge to which Kejriwal has responded, albeit indirectly, by claiming he has not enjoyed Dikshit’s power. Addressing the prime minister in a letter, Kejriwal claimed that had Modi not “divested... through an order in 2015” the AAP government of the sort of power wielded by previous Delhi administrations, “we would not come to you complaining about the IAS officers’ strike. We ourselves would sort that out. Today, you have all the powers and we have all the responsibilities. How will it work?”
The question is rhetorical. Because as the strikes—whether that of the bureaucrats or of the Delhi government—amply demonstrate: it won’t work. Literally. Ajay Maken, president of the Delhi Congress, has been scathing too about the AAP’s “unserious dharna politics”. Congress president Rahul Gandhi, in a tweet, described the sit-in as “anarchy”. “People of Delhi are the victims,” he wrote, “as this drama plays out.” The Congress finds itself in an invidious position, unable, as an opponent of the AAP in Delhi, to endorse its sit-in, but opening the door to show that opposition unity without the Congress is possible, that Congress leadership of a united opposition against Modi and the BJP is not a given.
Marlena says the Congress has shown that its petty political considerations and point-scoring trump principle. She points to the near-constant complaints of the Congress government in Puducherry about their struggles with an obstructive, politicking lieutenant governor as an example of Congress hypocrisy. “In Delhi,” says Marlena, “the Congress and BJP operate as a symphony orchestra. It’s pure political opportunism.” Desai, too, suggests that the Congress no longer has the ability to “articulate tricky distinctions”. Former AAP luminary Yogendra Yadav, now president of a fledgling political party, Swaraj India, has been severely critical of the AAP’s failures and its lack of “knowledge of the grammar of governance or even constitutional provisions”.
But even Yadav accepts that the L-G appears to have acted with malign intent. According to one AAP insider, who did not want to be named, “the L-G’s arrogance is manifest in his refusing—even now that there is no standoff—to hold a meeting with the chief minister. The IAS officers take their cue from the L-G and he takes his from the Centre. The malice is unprecedented.” This suggests that the end to the present standoff is only a papering over of the cracks. Manoj Tiwari, Delhi BJP president, says, “No one knows when Kejriwal will next decide to sit on dharna. No one knows why he sat on dharna in the first place and what he thinks he has achieved.”
Just hours after Kejriwal left the L-G’s house, effectively ending the sit-in, former AAP minister Somnath Bharti said he and another legislator had sought a meeting with the L-G only to be escorted off the premises by the police. “What is this going on,” an incensed Kejriwal asked on Twitter. “Why is L-G refusing to meet MLAs, MPs, ministers, CM? Does L-G know that he has a constitutional duty to meet them? He has no choice but to meet them? This is bizarre.” It’s why the AAP is campaigning so hard for statehood for the national capital. Raghav Chadha, a prominent party functionary and spokesperson, has called the sit-in the “first victory”, with the larger battle still to come.
On June 11, in a largely symbolic move, the Delhi assembly passed a resolution demanding that Delhi be granted statehood. Yadav, in a newspaper editorial, wrote that “Delhi deserves full statehood”. Marlena says the central government can retain full control “over the NDMC (New Delhi Municipal Corporation) area, over Lutyens’ Delhi and the diplomatic enclaves”, but the “rest of the city, some 20 million people, should have their own government answerable to them and them alone”.
In arguments presented to the Supreme Court back in November 2017, the Centre’s lawyers said that Union territories could not be turned into full-fledged states, that they were governed by the President (who appoints the L-G) and that executive powers in Delhi, in particular, could not be turned over exclusively to the Delhi government as a matter of national security. But the BJP in Delhi has been calling for full statehood for years. In 2014, before the Lok Sabha election in which the BJP swept all seven Delhi seats, the party released a manifesto for the capital of which statehood was a part.
Union minister Harsh Vardhan was then the BJP’s Delhi president and it’s instructive to revisit what he said in April 2014: “This election is being fought to make Narendra Modi the PM of the country, (and) the first thing we will demand from him is to give full statehood to Delhi.” That promise was quietly shelved before the Delhi elections in February 2015. Both the Congress and BJP acknowledge the need to allow Delhi voters to reap the full benefits of their democratic franchise. So why is the AAP demand for full statehood being mocked as a pipe dream?
Desai says the governance of Delhi is “structurally designed for discord”. And it is the exploitation of this unwieldy structure by the BJP at the Centre, many observers agree, that has brought into stark relief the need for a revision of Delhi’s status. AAP prides itself on its dedication to municipal governance. It claims it is not being allowed to do its job by the atypical animus of the Modi government. More broadly, it questions why a Delhi government should exist at all if it is not to address the concerns of the residents of Delhi without the central government peering over its shoulder.
Marlena quotes from an editorial written by Sisodia—to whom she was a key advisor on education policy until she was dismissed in April by the Centre, after three years on the job, as if an elected government should not have the right to its own appointees—to support her contention that AAP is straitjacketed by an absurd system. “Be it a chainsnatching incident in Anand Vihar,” Sisodia wrote, “or a rape of an infant in Shalimar Bagh, the only elected representative that the people of Delhi can hold accountable is India’s home minister, who is simultaneously tasked with issues in Jammu and Kashmir, the Northeast and Maoist insurgency in Central India.” You can guess, Marlena says wryly, “where that chain-snatching comes on his list of priorities.”
Does AAP protest too much? That’s a question for the voters of Delhi. Perhaps the only way to ensure the party is out of excuses, though, to force them to put their policies where their mouths are, is to consider seriously their proposition that the governance of Delhi, NDMC area aside, be the purview of the elected government. Maintaining the status quo no longer seems a viable option.