Any assessment of Kejariwal must concede the monumental nature of his
project. He has dared to dream of an emancipatory politics that is geared to unfold
the consequences of a new possibility. Established as well as newly
forged opportunistic parties exploiting the various fissures in society, anchored
in the minds of their followers by pure greed and rewards of office have been
ruling the roost. Kejariwal
arrived at this crucial juncture, this moment of crisis when the various
debauched versions of politics had ceased to interest people because ordinary citizens felt they had no say in state decision-making. A
sense of pervasive despair had overtaken a large number of people; each one of
them thought that alone he could not make the difference; he needed to convince
countless others like him. He was able to energies this inert mass of people and
inspired by his vision the political arena has seen the influx of IIT
engineers, management graduates, former civil servants, apart from common people.
It has radicalized the political sphere by posing a challenge to the tired old
generation of professional politicians or others who owe their rise to
prominence exclusively by inheritance or political maneuvering or daring acts
of criminality. A greater variety by way of “new people” itself promises to
open the possibilities of radical new evolution which had been stopped in its
tracks by the inbred nature of our politics. It would be irresponsible to spot
him as the man in Taine’s famous triad of the man, the moment and the milieu so
soon but he has certainly brought a glimmer of hope, something solid to stand
upon and look beyond the imprisoning wall of despair. But above all he has
promised to dismantle the political system where every source of power has been
conscripted to politics and political connections. Direct democracy would be a
reality and referendum the normal mode of consultation. He needs to be cheered,
if for nothing else, for the mobilsation
of valuable social capital in the interest of better politics.
It will be worth the recall that
he was part of the Anna brigade and the main plank of this agitation was
fighting corruption. After the parting of ways with Anna on the issue of a more
direct political engagement to fight
corruption Kejariwal began his campaign for being anointed as the font of moral
authority, as the social conscience of the age in a very systematic manner. He
painted everyone in the public eye in hues of black. Revelation of financial malfeasance and
corrupt practices, a disclosure a day, scandal piled upon scandal. Like Bernard Shaw, he
built his reputation by murdering other people’s reputation. But he was also
treading a dangerous path by setting himself up, as the Socratic figure, of a
detached disinterested dreamer one who could “set against the laws of the state a discourse of superior law, an ideal
against an established order of power.” He was stacking the dice every day but
I guess he misread the signal. He seemed to have located his utopia quite some
distance away in time. But the people of Delhi took him more seriously than he himself.
The “detached dreamer” was now called upon to take the role of a man of action.
He was found to be lacking in logistics as well as a viable strategy.
Surprisingly for a man who had at his command the national brains trust of IIT
and IIM fellows he did not seem to have
thought deeply enough. Abundant goodwill and a determination to do good are not
good enough to compensate for amateurishness, lack of experience, and ignorance
about the dimension of the problems. When you proclaim sainthood you are bound
to be judged by the high standard of a saint! The jury is out – almost on a
daily basis.
He solved the easier questions easily. Henceforth it was for the Aam
admi to decide whether its party would accept the support of another party
to form a government. Whether the CM will stay in a ten room bungalow or in a
three room quarter? In fact it seems the AAP is determined to disprove the wry
observation of the maverick thinker, commentator and polemicist Slavoj Zizek
“those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to
decide freely if we want to grant it to them.” he wanted to transform the
pretense in to the essence. Redeeming his
promise of electricity and free water were also rather easy and their
consequences, whatever they may be, would be felt only in the long run.It may
be a bit of pure theatre but it has reaped a great dividend by way of spurring
other parties to emulate him. So we have the slightly incongruous situation
where an MP sits on dharna to reduce the price of electricity. Another
political party has sought the opinion of the constituents to indicate their choice
of candidates in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. More reasons for
cheer for Mr. Kejariwal.
Unworkability is one of the main elements of utopian projects; the other
being a certain endearing vagueness. Who is an Aam admi? An Aam admi is
indeed an abstraction. In him he has sought to locate the source of ultimate
purity and honesty. Some kind of a noble savage dressed to make a living in
modern times. He is the personified victim of a dysfunctional system. The fact
of the matter is that he is a Janus faced creature, much like Sartre’s “half
victim half, half accomplice like everyone else”in a polity whose wheels are
kept in motion by the grease of corruption and extortion. To begin with who is
an Aam admi? The railway porter who will not hesitate to extort the
maximum portage from another Aam
admi, on one of the many railway stations? Is it the auto driver who will
maximize his advantage by refusing to take a fare on a lonely less frequented
route, or late in the night unless he shells out the price he has quoted? Is he
the milkman or vegetable vender who considers adulteration his birth right? The
international film director whose outing for an evening could mean the domestic
budget of any of the three categories of people mentioned previously? Or is he
the owner of a private airline? Or is he the law minister who orders about the
police to do his bidding whatever the circumstances? Or is he the one who is
prepared to let lose anarchy should the central government not accept his
advice? Aam admi is the embodiment of all the romantic notions about helpless
citizen pitted against the vast impersonal state but he is also Khas in
his own sphere of activity. Aam adami subsumes a variety of mutually hostile
interests; they do not make a solidarity group and are a source of many
contradictions. As indeed Kejariwal learnt to his embarrassment when he fled
from them to take shelter on the roof top.
His pronouncements about corruption also showed the same lack of
awareness of the scope and reach of corruption nor does he seem to be aware of
the slow, inefficient and unreliable process of law to curb it. When the time came to redeem his promise into the
CWG scandal and the lady who gave it a visible face -Sheela Dikshit- to set in motion definitive investigation, punishment, and
expiation,
the 370 page document with which
he had threatened to nail the culprits who had siphoned away tens of thousands
of crores of public money during the common wealth games turned out to be just a
whole baggage of news paper clippings, not enough to nail the culprit. Or was
it? The fact that he was sharing power with Congress added more grist to the
rumour mill. The ghost of murdered reputations has come to haunt him.
Kejariwal’s, mind is inscrutable. It is also dangerously agile and jumps
nimbly from one issue to another even without so much as a semblance of
continuity or design. May be he has programmed such a randomness in his mind
that even he does know not where the trajectory of his thinking will lead him
to.
His focus soon shifted the battle
lines to the unrequited sinfulness of the African nationals- from plunder of
astronomical sums of public money by a CM to peddling of drugs and sex on the
street- which was revealed to him by his law – or lawless - minister. Kejariwal’s
ideas about governance imply a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: or else he
would not have taken the legally and pragmatically indefensible position. As I
understand a minister, a minster of law at that - wanted his impromptu orders
to be implemented by the police. The law minister of Delhi has no authority in
law to order about police men He has, just as any citizen, the right to be
heard and his grievances attended to with utmost dispatch. As subsequent events
have shown the police was quite right in exercising circumspection.No one can
deny that the CM of Delhi should have control over the police. But so long as
the untenable position remains the police is duty bound to act in accordance
with this arrangement.
Unable to counter charges of
impropriety on part of his minster, he quickly turned the barrel on to the
police. No harm there. Police serves a useful purpose in giving all forms of
democratic and undemocratic protests – howsoever senseless, howsoever
meaningless- substance and form. A few broken skulls on either side, a demand
to punish the guilty policeman is also par for the course. But the
revolutionary nature of Kejariwal’s politics consisted in reneging on his
solemn oath to the constitution which he swore amidst great fanfare to profess
anarchy. His two day old dharna at the Rail Bhawan is reminiscent of the remark
of one of the Pussy riot activists “Humor, buffoonery, irreverence can be of
use in the quest for the truth.”But the truth did not emerge; here it led to
more controversy. How can a CM profess and propagate anarchy? Is he is now trying to locate his support base more in the urban
poor even at the risk of alienating a large number of middle class
constituents? Police has been a rallying cry for mobilization since the pre
independence days. Delhi has a considerable number of urban poor and a fairly
large number of youth - traditional foes of police – and they welcomed it with
great gusto. They seem to have the least to lose.
Not surprisingly his exhortations to anarchy
have been welcomed, even, by members of the middle and upper class ,including
civil servants, personalities from the film world, people living in gated communities
and others located in various islands of privilege. Radicalism finds a more
fertile breeding ground in the minds of the most conservative and reactionary
of circles. They can talk about injustice because they get more than their
share of justice all the time. But possibly they have not seen anarchy at close
quarters .The radicalization of the
urban masses could prove to be a dangerous thing, especially in view of the
fact that our democratic
infrastructure- time worn and decrepit- are already finding it difficult to manage dissent. More than 350 districts- largely
forests and rural areas- are already taken up by the activities of the extremist
groups, their criminal activities masked as “revolutionary “struggle. Add to
that the communal cauldron which is perpetually on the boil; we are sitting on a
tinder box. Anyone with “an adequate sense of causation”, anyone with a sense
of history could see that such frontier bravado could easily get out of hand.Tahrir
Square is an enticing metaphor but it hides the nightmarish reality of the
unworkability of the revolutionary hypothesis.
