Utopian crush

The bloodletting inside Aam Aadmi Party has been gruesomely public. Personal ambitions, jealousy, strategic differences have all played a role in the current fiasco. Arvind Kejriwal is winning this battle hands-down: he has seized this moment right after a victory to remove the ‘back-stabbers’.

Kejriwal is the only proven winner the party has, so the majority was always going to back him over his rivals. Yogendra Yadav lost Haryana badly; Prashant Bhushan would rather contest bar council elections, than fight it out on the mean streets of Delhi. That they decided to take on Kejriwal was a case of ego overriding political acumen.

But the long-run survival of the party will now depend on how the Delhi chief minister is able to balance his personal ambition — launching a 2019 challenge to Narendra Modi — with the structural reforms that are needed for the party to grow beyond Delhi.

Our political parties have never much cared about internal structures and processes, relying rather on the divinity of the high command to show light to the faithful. Activist Kejriwal had promised the opposite: a utopian, bottom-up self-rule, his version of swaraj. But politician Kejriwal has realised that revolution will come from above, not below.

One party, one CEO

India’s left-liberal intellectuals fawned on the Nehru-Gandhi high command for long, but grudgingly so. In Kejriwal’s version of swaraj, some of these academics and activists thought they had found their utopia. And then, the mustachioed IIT-ian who had built that utopia, gave them a rude reality check.

The self-rule idealist morphed into a pragmatic power practitioner who understood that an efficient organisation can have only one CEO. The anarchist turned out to be a ruthless boardroom player, taking out those who were undermining the unity of command and the direction of the party.

Kejriwal clearly believes that his best shot at challenging Modi in 2019 would be to trump the Gujarat model with his Delhi model, with no distractions in other states. This would have curbed the ambitions of the likes of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan, who never enjoyed playing second fiddle to Kejriwal.

With them gone, Kejriwal has lost two articulate spin-doctors on English language talk-shows. They could have amplified his performance as chief minister among a small, but influential section of voters who are not impressed with the parochialism of Kejriwal’s loyalists.

“This is a homogenous cohort of Hindi-speaking, north Indian men in their thirties and early forties, all of them younger than Kejriwal and all of them part of a coterie that seems to exclude anyone outside this thin demographic defined by age, sex, region and language,” wrote Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph. “These are obscure, undistinguished men who dimly glow in the light of Kejriwal’s sun.”

Saints and winners

Feudal power grab and saintly renunciation have been two key strands in India’s high command politics. Feudalism we still see in the dynasties at the top of many parties from the Congress to the DMK, the Samajwadi Party and Trinamool Congress, where leaders (and voters too) only trust their own blood in succession, in a desperate, genetic attempt to perpetuate power.

But leaders who renounce power also fascinated Indians: such leaders developed a saintly halo, which put them above the fray, conversely giving them more power and solidifying their position as the high command. Sonia Gandhi, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Bal Thackeray, Anna Hazare all derived their great power from the perception of giving up power.

But lately, Indians have woken up to the distortions that these renouncing ‘saints’ have on democratic decision-making. The saint becomes an alternative power centre to the elected office-holder, resulting in tension and sloth in decision-making.

In Narendra Modi, for the first time India elected a leader who showed an unabashed desire for power. He is no saint, his critics argue he is a sinner, climbing to power on corpses of the 2002 riot victims. But in May 2014, the post-liberalisation generation voted for Modi’s naked ambition over the strategic renunciation of the Gandhis.

And this was the same time when Arvind Kejriwal made his biggest political mistake by renouncing power, when he resigned as Delhi Chief Minister. He had hoped for sainthood, instead he was labelled the runaway, the shirker. Kejriwal had read the political wind completely wrong.

It was perhaps in that darkest hour that Kejriwal had his most pragmatic epiphany. In his speech at the party’s National Council last Sunday, Kejriwal spoke of the pragmatic desire to be the winner, over his pet sermon on clean politics. “Some people say that winning and losing is not important, I don’t believe that,” Kejriwal said. “There are thousands of registered political parties in India, but everyone knows Aam Aadmi Party because we win.”

Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian

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