Behind Kejriwal’s gambit

Arvind Kejriwal has done it again. The announcement of his resignation has stunned friends and foes alike. Turning his release on bail into a political opportunity, the Delhi chief minister’s decision reveals his knack for staying in the limelight.It is tempting to view Kejriwal’s move as exemplifying political opportunism or as personifying public saintliness. Neither offers the full picture – of a suave politician who has effortlessly blended the instruments of technocratic governance with the practice of populist politics.Neither subaltern hero nor radical socialist, Kejriwal’s vision for AAP is to make it a catch-all party of the sort that Congress once used to be, a big tent that could accommodate diverse political strands. A pragmatic politician, he will use the opportunities provided by his opponents to try to do just that.Kejriwal has framed his decision as an “agni pariksha”, trial by fire. This metaphor is designed to stir sympathy from across the political spectrum. Devout Hindus, for whom Ramayan is a sacred text, may identify with Sita’s trials as Ram, her husband and king of Ayodhya, instructs her to prove her purity to their subjects. Other Indians, for whom Ramayan is a timeless parable, may understand the metaphor as indicative of a cleansing of the self, whereby the very process of courting the people commits one to a purer life. If Ram is the righteous hero of Ramayan, Sita is the wronged one. 2024 began with the celebration of Ram’s exploits as India’s hero. If elections are held in Nov as AAP has demanded, the year may well close with invocations of Sita’s tribulations. It would be delicious irony if Kejriwal were to win on that platform.It is not only Sita and her agni pariksha that appear to have inspired Kejriwal. Back in 1970, Indira Gandhi too had called early elections after losing the legislative and judicial battle that year to abolish the privy purses. Frustrated with the institutions of parliamentary democracy, she too went to “the people”, calling on them to strengthen their mandate to her.When elections were called in March 1971, she won a landslide riding the wave of “garibi hatao”. Hemmed in by legal orders that inhibit his functioning as chief minister, Kejriwal has clearly borrowed a leaf out of her book and will hope to tide over any anti-incumbency against his govt, which has already served two terms.AAP’s political affairs committee is huddling to nominate a chief minister to replace Kejriwal. While it is expected that he will influence his replacement, relief from office will free him up for more on-ground political work, including public rallies that will ensure media attention. If AAP succeeds in persuading the preponement of the Delhi assembly elections to get them to be held with Jharkhand, Haryana and Maharashtra, we could see opposition parties in these states leveraging BJP’s recent reverses in the Lok Sabha elections to increase their presence in their respective Vidhan Sabhas: NDA had lost 23 seats in Maharashtra, 9 in Jharkhand, and 5 in Haryana. Although opposition parties will obviously focus on their own states, an improved performance will shape a national mood against the BJP-led govt at the Centre.Within Delhi, AAP can be expected to mobilise in its favour the control of the municipal corporation, where it enjoys an absolute majority: of the 250 seats in the body, it controls 134. In its bid to improve the 53% vote share that handed it a crushing majority in the 2020 Vidhan Sabha elections, it will likely utilise its network of municipal councillors and other party activists to buttress support. This is a strategy similar to the one followed by CPM in Bengal for 34 years – with the obvious caveat that the authority enjoyed by Delhi govt is more precarious than that of other state govts. By the same logic, BJP may well seek to utilise its councillors in its bid to wrest Delhi from AAP. Actually, it may well have imagined leveraging the anti-incumbency in the city-state to be easy, but for Kejriwal’s latest shocker.Kejriwal has made the most of the limited room for manoeuvre he has. For a party that rose to office on the back of a popular movement against corruption, the taint of fraud must be quickly shed. His release on bail might have been enough, but no self-respecting chief minister could be expected to stay on in office with the conditions attached to his discharge from prison. By resigning, he has nimbly skirted the charges of policy paralysis that would have inevitably followed. By declaring that he will carry on the battle from the legal court to the people’s court, he has brought “aam aadmi” back to political discourse in the national capital.This should have been cause for celebration. But the overall context of institutional degradation and personalistic politics in which such appeals “to the people” are made, is unsettling.The writer is Professor of Global Development Politics, University of York