Kajal Basu :
ARVIND KEJRIWAL’S resignation was inevitable the moment he petulantly announced that he would step down as chief minister of Delhi if his anticorruption bill wasn’t tabled during a four-day assembly session called by the Delhi government expressly for the purpose of passing the acridly contentious Jan Lokpal Bill and Swaraj Bill.
And the inevitable happened (because there already existed a no-holds-barred pan-party opposition to the bill and Kejriwal had done nothing to gather support from any legislators but his own). Kejriwal isn’t gone yet. His Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will continue to be a caretaker government for three or four days, minus the power to take any policy decisions. Not that this should matter: The AAP’s stint has not seen much policymaking. There is some apprehension among Congressmen, in particular, that Kejriwal will use his time to rattle the authorities with civic disruptions to prove that his popularity with the aam aadmi remains intact.
For many, Kejriwal’s resignation lacks the reasonableness of ethical conduct. He promises were binned as the AAP struggled to maintain its puritan cleanliness amidst self-damaging muck-raking (such as Kejriwal having to apologise at long last for his Law Minister Somnath Bharti’s continuing boorishness; the media revelation that Kejriwal had asked for ministerial accommodation comprising two adjacent bungalows with five bedrooms each; the brassy TV journalist-turned-brassy AAP spokesperson Ashutosh Gupta’s denigrating Lieutenant-Governor Najeeb Jung as a “Congress agent”, etc).
The AAP’s extraordinarily articulate top echelon has not so far explained why Kejriwal took the bill to an assembly session (where its defeat was a given) instead of taking it to his followers at the Ramlila Maidan, the public grounds where he had taken oath of office and where the bill’s victory was a given. Had Kejriwal armed himself with documented popular support for his 18-point bill, the matter of his resignation might not have arisen.
This illogica performance has all the signs of a man as desperate as he is ambitious. Kejriwal has repeatedly suggested that his government would (be allowed to) last as long as – and no longer than – the end of the fiscal or the general election, whichever came earlier. The rejection of the anticorruption bill is nothing if not the perfect opportunity to abdicate – and to do so while marching to a triumphal choral.
The question that everybody’s asking is: What now? The Lok Sabha election, obviously. The AAP has decided to contest in more than 300 seats (of the total 543). It believes that it has enough goodwill – and has demonstrated enough mojo – to win enough seats to figure significantly in parliament. This might be stretching things a bit: The only states where it will contest all seats are in Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. In Gujarat, say observers, it’s unlikely to more than scratch the surface; and its leaders, comprising mostly Central and North Indians, have not the faintest idea about how to steer the party around the byzantine, culturally complex, nearly abstracted politics of the southern reaches of the country.
Even as he stepped down after 49 days in office – the second shortest tenure of governance in India, after Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s miserable 13-day stint as prime minister in 1996 – Kejriwal has left behind a slew of unsorted issues, a bombed-out capital budget, and allegations and accusations that, going by India’s hardheaded laws, border on slander.
Not that he has the wrong targets in his sights but these targets, big as barns, have been around for decades. As enough journalists have realised (to their humiliation), you can’t bring down these targets with defiant posing. The influence of the business house of the Ambanis over governments has been pervasive – and well known – since the licence-raj days, when Dhirubhai Ambani lurked in the corridors of the home ministry clutching a briefcase to his chest. The influence that the late Ambani patriarch built – he shared a platform with Indira Gandhi when she bounced back to power in 1980, and the present president, Pranab Mukherjee, was a good friend – has been further strengthened by his elder son, Mukesh, whom Kejriwal specifically aimed at before he quit.
Nor is he off the mark about Lieutenant-Governor Najeeb Jung’s association with the Ambanis’ Reliance group of companies. As joint secretary (exploration) at the union ministry of petroleum and natural gas, Jung was party to the privatisation in 1994 of the Panna-Mukta oil fields. Now owned by a Reliance consortiu, it is the very basin that Kejriwal ordered to be investigated.
After a probe was initiated into the privatisation, Jung resigned and shortly after, headed Reliance’s European operations from an office in London. Then he moved to the Asian Development Bank, returning to Delhi to join Reliance Global Management Services Limited. From February 2005 to December 2006, Jung was honoris causa adviser to the chairman of the Observer Research Foundation, a Reliance-funded thinktank. Oddly, none of this finds a mention in any of Jung’s official biographies.
Every bit needs to be investigated, not least because Reliance accounts for roughly 7 per cent of the centre’s tax revenue (the argument being that it should be greatly more) but because Kejriwal has pulled the plug on himself, choosing flight to fight.
(Kajal Basu is a senior journalist based in Kolkata)
