The outcome of the Aam Aadmi Party’s National Executive meeting, scheduled today (4 March), has probably been scripted well in advance. Barring some last-minute compromises, it is more than likely that Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav will either be on their way out of the party or effectively sidelined. The initiative currently remains with the Arvind Kejriwal camp.
Their removal from the all-powerful, nine-member Political Affairs Committee (PAC), assuming it happens, on charges of conspiring against the party (Kejriwal) and trying to sabotage its prospects in the Delhi assembly election will dull the halo around the 27-month-old party that has been riding high on its recent landslide victory.
It is difficult to find a parallel to what has been happening in AAP in recent political memory. The Janata Party’s internal bickering after its landslide win in 1977, which led to its collapse in 1980, comes closest to the AAP crisis. The nature of the tussle then and the issues involved were, of course, different in scale and time.
Whatever be the final verdict of the party on Bhushan and Yadav – whether they are allowed to survive in AAP as lameducks or thrown out - the damage to AAP’s image has been done. The AAP dissenters were seen as the party’s conscience-keepers. But it has now come to a situation where only one side can win – the Kejriwal side is the obvious one.
The war within is not about the ideals and practices that this party wanted to follow, but about who will control it. There is no doubt that Kejriwal is the party’s strongest crowd-puller, and what his supporters are gunning for is giving him overwhelming power to take the party to greater heights. In this, AAP is now heading for the same kind of single-leader situation as every other party. Kejriwal will be to AAP what Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are for the Congress, Mulayam Singh Yadav for SP, Mayawati for BSP, Nitish Kumar for JD(U), Lalu Yadav for RJD, Naveen Patnaik for BJD, Mamata Banerjee for TMC.
Kejriwal’s opponents want AAP to be based on the twin principles of “democracy and swaraj”, as Yogendra Yadav said in a recent interview, and give up its high command culture, as Prashant Bhushan has said. But whichever way the conflict is resolved, it is clear that the party cannot abandon its dependence on Kejriwal and his rising personality cult. Kejriwal is AAP’s national convenor.
The dictionary meaning of “convenor” would suggest that Kejriwal’s real job is to merely “call people together for a meeting of a committee”. By that definition, his current job profile is not that of arbiter of AAP’s fortunes or even party president. The founding fathers perhaps preferred the title `convenor’ to president because they wanted to send out the message that the party would be run on the basis of collective leadership and collective conscience. Thus, their erstwhile white caps carried two legends: Main Hun Anna and Humein Chahiye Swaraj.
Bhushan, Yadav and Admiral L Ramdas, through their letters, are reminding Kejriwal that he should remain a mere convenor, or even leave the post to one of them. They would like to have a decisive say on issues, especially those on ethics and probity. Their argument, at least for public consumption, is that the party was founded to provide alternate politics, not just become an alternate party.
Yogendra Yadav in afile photo. PTI
But the level of distrust between the two sides has now become too wide to paper over easily. With loyalists on the two sides giving their own versions to the media and in tweets, the gap can only get wider in the coming days.
At today’s meeting, Arvind Kejriwal will be missing. Since there is no number two, no co-convenor in the party, it is not clear who will preside over the meeting. In AAP’s website, Gopal Rai (minister in Kejriwal’s cabinet) comes second in the list of nine PAC members. The other members are Ilias Azmi, Kumar Vishwas, Manish Sisodia, Pankaj Gupta, Prashant Bhushan, Sanjay Singh and Yogendra Yadav.
Kejriwal is admittedly unwell. Diabetes and its consequent problems have made him homebound. A Kejriwal loyalist termed Yadav as “gangrene” for the party. He also said that Yadav will only be bad for Kejriwal’s health – both metaphorically and in actual terms. “Yogendra Yadav’s negativity and falsehood will occupy so much of Arvind’s mindspace that it will ruin his health. It’s time this gangrene is removed. If Arvind and the party have to return to good health that’s the only recourse left”, he told Firstpost.
Kejriwal’s tweets yesterday were loaded: “I refuse to be drawn into this ugly battle. Will concentrate only on Delhi's governance. I will not let (the) trust of people of Delhi break….I am deeply hurt and pained by what is going on in the party. This is betrayal of trust that Delhi posed in us.”
He didn’t clarify who was betraying Delhi’s trust, or who was causing him “hurt and pain”. By saying “I refuse to be drawn into this ugly battle”, he may be effectively asking his supporters to fix the problem before he returns.
In an interview to NDTV India, Yadav rather remorsefully hinted that the Kejriwal camp may have made up its mind. “Lagata Hai Man Ban gaya hai, Kuchal Do, Masal Do, Doosri Awaj Ko”. (Looks like their mind is made up. It is now about crushing the other voice).
After watching the proceedings of the National Executive, choreographed or otherwise, from his Kaushambi, Ghaziabad, residence, Kejriwal will take off for Bangalore on a 10-day naturopathy course to contain his diabetes and other related health problems. He will virtually be incommunicado till 15 March, possibly oblivious to the muck his loyalists and challengers might raise with greater ferocity.
The last time he had gone there with Anna, he had felt greatly relieved of his diabetes and stress-related problems. Since then he has left his mentor Anna. This time he will be there alone, in total solitude, hoping for relief, not just from diabetes, but also from the pain of betrayal. But then, as someone had earlier jokingly posted on Whatsapp, “Yogendra Yadav speaks so sweetly that the person he talks to would get infected by sugar”. A diabetic Kejriwal may decide that so much sugar in his system may not be good.
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