Wednesday’s six-hour-long deliberations at the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s national executive meeting saw Arvind Kejriwal emerge as the supreme leader of the young political formation.
While Kejriwal was conspicuous by his absence at the meeting, the national executive’s majority decision to drop the party’s founder-member Prashant Bhushan and its most articulate spokesperson Yogendra Yadav was a sign of his total control over the party.
The party rejected Kejriwal’s offer to quit as AAP convenor.
It is a victory of the ‘Delhi Group’ led by Kejriwal and his young supporters — including Sanjay Singh, Dilip Pandey, Deepak Bajpai, Ashish Khetan and Ashutosh — over the old guard represented by Bhushan, Admiral L Ramdas and others.
Delhi group The Delhi Group in the AAP was responsible for the strategy and campaign that led to the party’s stupendous victory in the recently-held Delhi Assembly elections.
Bhushan was not involved in the campaign as he was opposed to the manner in which the candidates were picked.
As a visibly disappointed Bhushan walked away from the national executive, Kumar Vishwas announcing the decision to drop him and Yadav from the Political Affairs Committee reflected the AAP’s transformation from an idealistic, anti-corruption movement to a pragmatic, mainstream political party.
Although clubbed together, Bhushan’s removal from the PAC is a more definite sign of the growing gap between the practice and the idea of AAP’s internal functioning.
The decision on Yadav had more to do with internal rivalries and Yadav’s own ambitions about his role in the party’s expansion in other States.
Bhushan played a critical role in the AAP’s branding as a crusader against corruption, with his insistence on transparency in collection of funds, intermittent disclosures about corporate corruption and stress on selecting candidates with clean records.
He faced the wrath of Kejriwal’s supporters and AAP volunteers because they felt that he was harming the party’s interests during a make-or-mar election in Delhi.
It did not help Bhushan’s case that his father, AAP’s founder member Shanti Bhushan, publicly endorsed the BJP chief minister nominee Kiran Bedi’s candidature during the Assembly election.
In Yadav’s case, it was his advocating the AAP’s expansion into other States, particularly Punjab and Haryana, that led to Kejriwal easing him out. His role was publicly criticised by lawyer and activist HS Phoolka, who contested the parliamentary elections on an AAP ticket from Ludhiana.