A B- grade movie called AAP

The recent crisis in the Aam Aadmi Party ( AAP) has cynics chuckling quietly to themselves. They insist that ideals and utopias are alien to politics. Politics is a world of necessity, dirt and manipulation, and the sooner AAP realises this, the sooner it can normalise into a party. Realists stir the pot further by claiming that all this noise is part of the maturing of AAP, the process Arvind Kejriwal turning into another party boss.

AAP is an anthropologically curious party. It seems desperate to destroy genealogies, decry ancestors and disown founders. Sadly, many of its founders were outstanding people, exceptional professionals, people whose Cassandra- like warnings we failed to listen to. In fact, Madhu Bhaduri, the Indian Forest Service officer who was a founder- member, wrote a series of candid letters which need to be anthologised along with other dissenting notes. In her letters, Ms Bhaduri emphasised two sets of dangers: that AAP members were crude in its behaviour to women, and that when a critique was leveled, AAP either played hostile or turned deaf.

One sees this rather clearly in the party’s attitude to Admiral Ramdas who was appointed party Lokayukt. Here again there are two critical issues. Admiral Ramdas is a man of tremendous integrity. When he’s with AAP, he adds to the integrity of AAP. Instead of acknowledging that, AAP ignores him, treats him as dispensable. For many observers, the treatment of Admiral Ramdas points to a critical chink in the AAP. It conveys a sense of ingratitude, an absentmindedness, that AAP feels it is better off without some of its idealistic founders.

One must admit that not all AAP founders displayed the integrity, dignity and calm of Admiral Ramdas or Ms Bhaduri. Shanti Bhushan the lawyer does not quite rank with them. Instead of playing a Bhisma or Nestor, Mr Bhushan seemed to be on an ego trip, treating AAP almost like a family convenience. His comments were shallow, even spiteful. His attempts to foist the bumbling Kiran Bedi on the AAP as a likely leader showed that dissenters like him, especially when they run out of ideas and ideals, become repetitive and spiteful.

AAP does seem to have problem with its past. The party emerged from the Anna Hazare movement and dispensing with Mr Hazare was its first sacred ritual. One has to also remember that AAP was ambivalent towards Aruna Roy and the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and chose to move separately. This distancing from other movements has been devastating for the AAP. It has left AAP impoverished.

One sees that the activists of the anti- nuclear movement at Kudankulam have moved away from the AAP, citing its obsession with struggles in Delhi. One senses a similar fear in Medha Patkar’s ambivalence that the AAP might become a political movement without social content, thus, eventually, a party like any other.

I confess I have been taking a circuitous route to analysing the current confrontation, which has moved from rhetorical navel gazing to an attack on the jugular. AAP is a movement, a dream of politics with a wider constituency and also an organised party. And it’s the well- wishers of the AAP, the volunteers who worked ceaselessly during elections, who have kept the ideals alive.

There is a Rashomonlike touch to AAP’s current crisis. In Akira Kurosawa’s movie, we see a murder unfold through three perspectives, each of which has a compelling power of its own. Similarly, AAP is a battle of competing pieties, a struggle between legalistic piety, Lohiate piety and Gandhian piety. Everyone claims he is Christ and the rest a pack of Judases. Each feels he has been backstabbed. In fact, the backstab rather than the broom might be the new symbol of the party. As a wag put it, AAP is wonderful in the diversity of its supporters. The dogma begins with leadership and each leader, in a Tolstoyan sense, is dogmatic in his own special way.

There is Mr Kejriwal, with his team of Manish Sisodia, Ashutosh and Kumar Vishvas. The rumour is that his team is second- rate. It lacks intellectual bite. Mr Kejriwal replies that his team may not have stars or strategists but their hearts are made of gold. He feels his team is clear- hearted enough after the electoral victory to clean up its act. The first and most visible targets of his team are Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan.

Prasant Bhushan is a persistent gadfly. Between his father and him, they shower negativism like confetti. They feel Mr Kejriwal is not the leader they want to follow and their comments devalue him. Mr Yadav plays the ideologue and strategist. He is more careful in his words. If Mr Bhushan sounds like a dissenting judge facing a hostile bunch of colleagues, Mr Yadav plays the wise ideologue, Machiavelli’s Machiavelli. His conflation of morality and strategy always gives him the high ground. His Lohiate past adds to his theological air and his psephological sense and air of being perpetually strategic gives him a sense of being “the immaculate conception.” His stand would be more bearable if he were less humble. Mr Yadav’s crime according to Mr Kejriwal is that he gave interviews to editors criticising his leadership. For Mr Kejriwal, the party at election time has to move without friction or doubt. Mr Yadav and Mr Bhushan created both.

At one level it is a power- struggle, at another a game of oneupmanship. It is the timing that is a catastrophe. Instead of celebrating victory and moving on, the AAP is regurgitating itself obsessively. One senses that part of the party feels the time for grand debates is over and politics is now in governance. One could have looked at all these arguments more clinically except for the overflowing bile and the sideshow of piety. Mr Kejriwal’s core group will survive but he has lost the sheen. There is a banality to the party that has lost its visions of everydayness. Worse, it has destroyed the hopes of a generation who wanted diversity in decisiveness. This Mr Kejriwal and the AAP have failed to provide.

The writer is a social science nomad

At one level it is a power struggle, at another a game of oneupmanship. The timing is a

catastrophe. Instead of celebrating victory and moving on, AAP is regurgitating itself obsessively.