What we are witnessing in Delhi today is historic – for the first time
since Independence a legitimate political party has refused to play by the
rules that all political parties in India have battened on for sixty-five
years; for the first time a State Government has taken on the Central
Government at its own doorstep; for the first time a Chief Minister and his
entire Cabinet are sitting in protest in their own capital; for the first time
their own police force is ranged against them in their thousands.
The immediate reason for this may be the demand for the suspension of
five police officials, but the actual reason is more basic, and fundamental to
any democracy — accountability of the rulers to the ruled.
Kejriwal fighting the Central Government on Delhi streets
The rulers are not just the politicians and the bureaucrats – they are
also the larger constituency that benefits from the present status quo: the
industrialists, the TV and news organisations, the “cognoscenti”, the
“glitterati”, the South Delhi socialites, the “intelligentsia” that makes a
nice living by appearing nightly on TV panel discussions: in short, all those
who are comfortable with the status quo.
They have, with the assistance of disgruntled elements like Kiran Bedi
and Captain Gopinath, unleashed a veritable barrage of abuse and condemnation
against Kejriwal and his party over the last week, terming him a Dictator,
Anarchist, Chief Protestor, Law-breaker and so on.
It is because they feel genuinely threatened by the forces that the AAP
has unleashed, the ethical standards that it has prescribed and demonstrated,
the personal examples that its leaders have shown. Because they know that if
these paradigms become the norm of a new India then the sand castles that these
privileged reside in shall come crumbling down in no time.
And so they accuse Kejriwal of not following prescribed conventions,
protocol or procedure and thus encouraging anarchy. Let us look at just three
of these alleged transgressions:
1. Law Minister
Somnath Bharti asking for a meeting of judicial officers of Delhi. What is
improper about this? Isn’t the judiciary a part of the government – funded,
staffed, appointed by the state.
Yes, it is
operationally independent of the government (as it should be) but it is
certainly not a holy cow whose performance cannot be questioned, or monitored,
by the people of this country through their elected representatives.
The judiciary is
meant to serve the people, just as the bureaucracy is, and it cannot have
internal accountability only. An elected government has to have the right to
review its performance, especially given the pathetic state of the disposal of
cases in courts.
In my view Mr.
Bharti was within his rights to take a meeting of judicial officers to assess
the shortcomings of the system (which is the first step to removing these
shortcomings). Yes, he could have routed the request through the High Court,
but this was a trivial error and certainly not the grievous violation that the
media made it out to be.
To the contrary,
the Law Minister should be lauded for his initiative in seeking to address the
issue instead of washing his hands of it as ALL LAW MINISTERS OF THIS COUNTRY
HAVE DONE SO FAR, as if the collapse of the judicial redressal system was no
concern of the government!
——-
2. Subsidies on
water and power to small consumers in Delhi (something for which Kejriwal has
been contemptuously branded a populist). Really?
The Central
Government dishes out more than 160000 crores worth of subsidy every year on
just three schemes (Mid-day Meals, MNREGA and Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan). Just about
every state gives subsidies on water and power.
Here’s something
Mr. Arnab Goswami and his kind should consider: the Golf Club in New Delhi
which has about 4000 privileged members (all of whom are now arraigned against
Kejriwal) has been given 250 acres of the most expensive real estate in the
country worth 60000 crores for a paltry lease of about Rs. 15 lakhs per annum.
The annual return
on Rs. 60000 crores should be at the very least Rs. 6000 crores: in effect,
what this means is that every member of the Golf Club is being given a subsidy
of Rs. 1.50 crores every year! The same is the case with the Gymkhana Club,
another watering hole for the rich, the famous, and the now scared.
According to the
latest report of the RBI, the total non-performing assets (NPA) of the Banks in
India is more than Rs. 1.60 lakh crores.
NPA is just a
euphemism for what the Vijay Mallyas and the Captain Gopinaths of the world owe
to the aam aadmi (and refuse to pay) while flying all over the world in their
private jets and pontificating in TV studios on the correct form of governance.
Is it “populism” if indulged in by Kejriwal, and “entitlement” and “economic
surge” when practiced by others ?
——-
3. Somnath Bharti’s
(Kejriwal’s Law Minister) mid-night visit to Khirkee village has generated so
much misinformation, ignorance of the law, reverse racism and hypocritical
harangues that it is sickening.
Shorne of all this,
what does the entire incident amount to? Merely this: a Minister, in response
to complaints by residents (which are on record, as is the police inaction on
them for months) of a locality personally visits the spot and asks the police
to take immediate action by raiding the building where illegal activities are
taking place.
The police refuse and insult the Minister. This is the essence of the
matter.
All the rest –
search warrants, lack of female police, racism, urinating in public, cavity
search(!) [the latest addition to the shrinking vocabulary of Ms. Meenakshi
Lekhi] etc.- are red herrings and a smoke screen which no doubt the judicial
Inquiry Commission shall see through.
How was the
Minister wrong in asking the police to take action? Is it a Minister’s job to
simply sit in an air-conditioned office and write on files? (a question which
Kejriwal has asked and to which we are still waiting for an enlightened
response from Ms. Barkha Dutt and gang).
Does the police
require a search warrant to enter a place where they have reason to believe
that illegal activities are going on? Really, Mr. Salve?
If so, then how do you explain their barging into the house in the Batla
House encounter and shooting three people, WITHOUT A SEARCH WARRANT? Or their
constant nocturnal forays into the poor whore-houses of GB Road whenever they
are short of spending money?
——-
No, sir, the opposition to Kejriwal from the BJP and the Congress, from
the Arnab Goswamis, Rajdeep Sardesais, the Barkha Dutts, the Kiran Bedis, from
the Editors of English dailies, from the captains of industry, from the Single
Malts and Bloody Marys of Gymkhana and Golf Clubs, does not stem from any
illegality or impropriety on his part, or from any ideological differences
between them.
It stems from their complete and total failure to comprehend what
Kejriwal is and what he stands for. It stems also from the deep social divide
between the upper crust of society( who are happy with the status quo where
their money, power and contacts can ensure them a comfortable life) and the
masses below them who have to daily bear the brunt of the system inspired corruption,
harassment, inconvenience and indignity that the present dispensation
guarantees them.
This (hitherto unacknowledged and invisible) divide becomes clear when
we compare the editorial slants of the English and Hindi channels in the
coverage of the ongoing protests: the former are virulently anti AAP and only
pop up panelists who support that view, while the latter appear to be more
understanding of what AAP is trying to do.
Those who are denouncing Kejriwal for being an autocrat, anarchist,
activist and for protesting at Raisina Road are missing the most obvious point
of his movement – THAT KEJRIWAL WILL NOT PLAY BY THEIR RULES ANY MORE.
As they say in Las Vegas – you can’t beat the house, because the dice
are loaded against you. Everyone wants him to play with their set of dice
which they mysteriously call the Constitution and the CRPC!) but Kejriwal
wants to play with his own dice, hence the confrontation.
They want him to pass a joint resolution of the Assembly for bringing
the police under the Delhi govt.-he’s smart enough to see that the resolution
will be thrown into the same waste paper basket where presumably the Ordinance
on protecting convicted MPs was consigned by Rahul Gandhi.
They want him to be a good boy and take his dharna to Jantar Mantar
where all civilised protests begin and inevitably end, while the govt. of the
day can get on with its gerrymandering uninterrupted-he knows that unless he
disrupts the comfortable existence of the bourgeois he may as well relieve
himself in the Yamuna for all the difference he will make.
They want him to sit in the Secretariat and be guided by his bureaucrats
and lose all touch with reality- he won’t fall for this Pavlovian routine. They
desperately want him to become one of them, red light, siren, gun-toting
commandos, Lutyen’s bungalow and all- he knows that if he falls for this he
loses his USP and becomes just an intern in this hoary club of gnarled sinners.
They want him to follow the script co-authored by all the political
parties of the day, not one excluded, because this script contains an
agreed-upon plot, wherein politicians make noises but don’t act against each
other, wherein corruption is just a sound-bite, where dynastic succession is a
silently accepted sine qua non, where no one is interested in finding out
whether the hundreds of proved Swiss bank accounts contain anything other than
Swiss chocolates – Kejriwal, however, wants to write his own script with
substantial inputs from the aam aadmi, not from the Ambanis or the Radias or
the Shobhna Bhartias.
They want him to talk about corruption but not do anything about it,
something Manish Tewari’s poetic flair would term “willing to wound but afraid
to strike”, an attitude as old as Chanakya and Kautilya which offers all of us
a catharsis via the good offices of Arnab Goswami and little else- but Kejriwal
is no respecter of Machiavelli or Chanakya, his vocabulary is limited because
he can only call a spade a spade, he is colour blind because he can only see in
black and white (the shades of greys can be left for the likes of Manu
Singhvi), and therefore he insists on striking, not just talking.
Is there any cause for surprise, therefore, at why the present
dispensation, both in and out of government, is rattled by this five foot four
inch “insect” from Ghaziabad? He is neither fish nor fowl, he defies
understanding.
The establishment has made the supreme mistake of trying to counter him
by quoting the rules of the game (loaded in the former’s favour, naturally!)
they are past masters of- but Kejriwal has changed the rules, and now they
don’t know how to control him or neutralise him.
For the time being only Kejriwal knows the new rules, and he is springing
them on the carpet baggers one by one, catching them by surprise all the time.
Forget the English TV channels-they rarely get anything right. Forget
the Manish Tewaris, the Kiran Bedis, the FICCI spokespersons, the Minakshi
Lekhis- they are either scared witless or rank opportunists. What they all do
have in common, however, is that they have failed to see how the common man-the
aam aadmi-are gathering behind this dimunitive man with the perpetual cough.
The sincerity, integrity and commitment of this man is phenomenal, his
capacity to harness the anger and frustration of the people is limitless. His
defiance of accepted conventions and interpretations is not anarchy – it is
nothing short of a revolution. When the people have had enough of injustice, callousness
and indignity, they will not play by the rules of the rulers-they will make new
rules.
The French Revolution would not have happened if the existing
rules had been followed. Tehrir Square would not have happened if everyone
swore by the old rules. Changing the rules, Mr. Home Minister, is not anarchy –
it is the beginning of a people’s revolution.
The sooner we realise this the less pain in the transition, the less
violence. No matter how the stand-off in Delhi ends – capitulation by the Home Minister
and the Police, withdrawal of support by the Congress, imposition of
President’s Rule, police violence on the protesters and their eviction – one
thing is certain: Kejriwal is going nowhere.
He, and his paradigms, are here to stay and haunt our rulers. With his
uncanny understanding of the pulse of the people he has re-written the rules of
politics and governance.
There are now only two options Kejriwal has left the ruling class –
either they change, or the people will change them.
Avay Shukla retired from
the Indian Administrative Service in December 2010. He is a keen environmentalist
and loves the mountains- he has made them his home.
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