2014: The Election That Changed India (30 page)

AAP, on the other hand, did not have a film legend to lead it, no long history of agitational politics, limited funding and no strong organizational base. What it did have, though, was the infectious energy and ideas of a young, highly motivated team. And yes, it had an issue which felt urgent at the time—public anger against political corruption.

Kejriwal crafted his political strategy for Delhi brilliantly. The symbolism of the aam aadmi in a Gandhi topi with a
jhadu
(broom) in hand taking on Delhi’s entrenched VIP culture was too powerful to ignore. ‘I wanted the man on the street to identify with us. The Gandhi topi which we had used during the Anna movement and a jhadu gave us that identity,’ he told me later.

I visited the AAP headquarters once and was struck by how young and enthusiastic everyone was. It felt to me that the spirit of idealism and voluntarism, which seemed to have disappeared from politics, had been revived here. A merchant banker who had quit his job to join the AAP told me, ‘When I was making money at the bank, I didn’t really know who I was making it for. Now, when I am collecting funds for AAP, I know I am involved in nation building.’

The AAP’s tactics were almost guerrilla-like, a ‘hit-and-run’ politics designed to create a constant made-for-TV drama. I remember when Manish Sisodia, Kejriwal’s man Friday and a former journalist, came to see us seeking media support for their campaign against inflated power bills. ‘Arvindji will be going on a fast on the issue, please do cover it well,’ he requested. I must confess a certain weariness had developed over Kejriwal’s perpetual dharna politics, and the newsroom wasn’t too excited.

The dharna was on a Sunday, usually a slow news day. Kejriwal had most likely chosen the day for this very reason. But he wasn’t going to make this a routine news event. He asked the gathered crowds to burn their electricity bills and then climbed up an electricity pole himself. Pandemonium broke out, the police rushed in, water cannons had to be used. Kejriwal had got his breaking news TV moment .

Right through 2012–13, there were several such moments when Kejriwal simply outsmarted his more experienced political rivals. When the municipal authorities tore down AAP posters and banners, he got auto rickshaws to carry his political message or volunteers to hold up banners at traffic signals and flyovers. When the Delhi gang rape in December 2012 led to street protests, Kejriwal was the first politician to join the protestors and call for the Delhi police commissioner’s removal. The AAP got 10 lakh citizen letters protesting the inflated power and water bills, and handed them over to chief minister Sheila Dikshit. Kejriwal set the agenda; the national parties were forced to follow in his wake.

The aim was always to create the kind of news which would excite the national media and keep the AAP visible at all times. An SMS joke ran as follows: The Congress and BJP tell Kejriwal, ‘We have money, muscle, men, what do you have?’ Kejriwal replies,
‘Mere paas media hai!’
(I have the media with me.)

A good example of how the party operated was the AAP ‘exposé’ on Robert Vadra, Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law. An
Economic Times
report had mentioned Vadra’s land deals in 2011 but the story had been quickly buried. An investigative journalist had taken
the documents to a senior BJP leader, asking him to take it up in Parliament. But the documents never saw the light of day. Tired of waiting, the journalist took the papers to Kejriwal and lawyer-activist Prashant Bhushan. They held a press conference almost right away and got mileage across the media. A few weeks later, in an attempt to appear even-handed, they did another ‘exposé’, this time on Gadkari’s alleged links with an irrigation scam.

Kejriwal was conscious of using the media as an ally. Like Modi, Kejriwal was at ease in front of a camera and never short of a strong sound bite. Some of the AAP leader’s closest advisers were journalists. One of my own colleagues, Ashutosh, who edited our Hindi channel IBN 7, joined AAP. ‘He is the cleverest politician since Mahatma Gandhi!’ claimed Ashutosh, sounding like a complete fanboy.

Ashutosh eventually contested the Lok Sabha elections on an AAP ticket, one of quite a few journalists to take the bait. Kejriwal had, as Amit Shah had suggested at Jaitley’s lunch, once offered me the lure of a ticket. ‘We need good people in politics, you must join us,’ he said earnestly. This was not the first time a political party had suggested that I make the switch. My response each time was much the same. ‘Thank you, but no thank you. Happy to observe politics from a distance.’ I loved journalism too much to lose my independence. Besides, I didn’t have the thick skin that
netagiri
required and was far from endorsing the Kejriwal brand of non-stop agitational politics.

Despite the rising support for his party, I never did believe Kejriwal would form the next government in Delhi. The day before the Delhi assembly election results, I was moderating a session at the
Hindustan Times
Leadership Summit with Pakistan cricket captain-turned-politician, Imran Khan. Before we went on stage, I told Imran that he was a bit like the Arvind Kejriwal of Pakistan. ‘How come?’ he asked. ‘Well, you both have a huge fan base among the young, are very popular on TV and the social media, but you both would probably do better in cyberspace than at the ballot box!’ Imran was only faintly amused.

The next day, I was proven wrong. Kejriwal won twenty-eight
of the seventy seats in the Delhi assembly while the Congress was decimated with just eight seats and the BJP fell short of a majority with thirty-two seats. Kejriwal held the balance of power. In an interview on 10 December 2013, the day after the results, he told me he would never take Congress support to form a government. A little over a fortnight later, he appeared to conveniently change his mind.

The Congress decision to support Kejriwal was reportedly orchestrated by Rahul Gandhi. Apparently, Rahul was impressed with Kejriwal’s style of politics based on youth power and voluntarism. Maybe he liked the idea of an NGO activist transforming himself into an idealistic politician. Or maybe, as some Congressmen suggested to me, he saw Kejriwal as a potential ally in the future battle against a Modi-led BJP.

Arvind Kejriwal was sworn in as Delhi’s chief minister on 28 December before a rapturous crowd at the Ramlila Maidan. He spoke with great passion, as always. ‘If 1.5 crore Delhiites can get together, we can root out corruption. Let us swear we will never take or receive a bribe.’ He even sang songs that had the audience cheering him along. For those few hours at least, it appeared that Narendra Modi was not the only magnetic politician who could connect with the masses. He now had real competition. But Kejriwal would soon learn that there is a big difference between being a populist streetfighter and occupying a seat of responsibility.

From a newsman’s perspective, there is only one word to describe the forty-nine days Kejriwal was in power in Delhi—chaotic. Not a single day passed without Kejriwal or some member of the AAP party giving us a news break. For a while it seemed that tracking Kejriwal had become a media obsession. In one of our Sunday phone conversations, Modi seemed to lose his poise,
‘Tumhare Dilli media ko Kejriwal ke aage kuch dikhta hai ya nahi. Baaki chief ministers ko tum nahi dikhate aur Kejriwal ko tumne national leader bana diya!’
(Your Delhi media does not seem to see anything beyond Kejriwal.

You don’t show any other chief minister and you have made Kejriwal a national leader). Clearly, in the run-up to the general elections, the AAP leader was getting under the skin of his bigger rivals.

Modi, though, had a point. My defence was the ‘tyranny of distance’. The phrase comes from the landmark Australian book (with the same title) by historian Geoffrey Blainey which argued how Australia’s geographical remoteness had shaped its history. Geographical proximities, sadly, define news priorities in the so-called ‘national’ Indian media. Since Kejriwal was operating in and around Delhi within a few kilometres of most TV studio headquarters (Noida near Delhi has the highest media density in India), he was easily accessible. It was so much easier to park an OB van outside the Delhi secretariat than in the heart of Bastar or Kokrajhar.

It’s a dilemma I have wrestled with for years. Most news channels have dozens of reporters in Delhi but just one for the entire seven states of the north-east. In states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, we rely on a stringer network. Naturally, news becomes metro-centric, with vast areas of the country going uncovered. On any given day, stories from Delhi occupy more than half the news space. We cover Ranchi when Dhoni reaches home; only a major Naxal attack takes us to a Raipur. The business model of modern television is our lamentable excuse. We are simply not willing to invest in building a strong national network.

The media-savvy Kejriwal knew this and exploited the situation to the hilt. Everything he said or did became a live news event. When he attempted a Janata Durbar (public hearing), there was a near stampede. When he decided to provide free water and subsidized power to specific income groups, it set off a raging debate. When he invited people to ‘sting’ government officials, it generated even more controversy. And when a minister in his government, Somnath Bharti, went on a midnight raid at the homes of African nationals accused of drug and sex trafficking, he was accused of ‘racism’.

The first major turning point was Kejriwal’s decision to go on a dharna at Rajpath just outside the Union home ministry, demanding the suspension of five Delhi police officers. At a thirty-two-hour street
protest at the venue where the Republic Day parade was to take place in a few days, Kejriwal appeared less like a chief minister and more like a self-styled anarchist. ‘Yes, I am an anarchist,’ he told his supporters, urging them to reach Rajpath. It was an ill-considered remark. For once, his attempt at clever political choreography had let him down. With the images of an elected government clashing with its own police on the streets splashing across the media, Kejriwal’s confrontational politics now signalled political immaturity. Former judge Santosh Hegde termed it ‘pure and simple arrogance of power’.

Slowly, the goodwill began to dissipate and middle-class disenchantment with the AAP leader set in. The television studio, which had once been his ally, became a double-edged sword, subjecting his government to an almost unprecedented scrutiny. If the coverage of the AAP during the assembly election campaign bordered on the euphoric, it was now openly hostile in some news networks. ‘Hashtag aggression’—an euphemism for agenda-driven ‘supari’ journalism—saw Kejriwal being targeted with tags like #AAPAnarchy, #AAPDrama, #AAPIntolerant, #AAPMobocracy on Twitter. Kejriwal was convinced that the ‘corporate’ media under Modi’s instructions was behind the campaign. When we did a critical story around the Rajpath dharna, I got a call from one of Kejriwal’s aides who said, ‘Looks like Modi has bought you guys too!’ Paranoia had now set in.

The BJP was delighted that Kejriwal had pressed the self-destruct button. Party leaders like Subramanian Swamy were ‘assigned’ to find anything they could to undermine the AAP leader’s credibility. ‘I will expose this corrupt guy,’ Swamy told me with relish. He had apparently been promised a Lok Sabha ticket for his efforts. The promise would not be met. Nor would Kejriwal’s ‘corruption’ be revealed.

The underclass in the slums and
jhuggi
s who had voted for AAP were still firmly with Kejriwal. I remember a street vendor telling me that for the first time the constables were scared of taking
hafta
for fear of being ‘stung’. But the middle class and the opinion makers who had been swayed by AAP’s rhetoric were now losing faith. It
was only a matter of time before AAP scripted its own obituary.

I was in Mumbai attending an award function on Valentine’s Day morning when the rumours began to swirl that Kejriwal was about to resign because the Opposition in the Delhi assembly wasn’t going to support his Jan Lokpal bill. My hosts asked me why I wasn’t in the studio to anchor the impending breaking news. I rather cynically replied, ‘Don’t worry, Kejriwal won’t resign in the morning, he will only step down, if he does, in prime time!’

Sure enough, around 6 p.m., the story began to gather momentum. A meeting of the AAP’s political affairs core group had been called to take a decision on whether to step out of the government. I was still in Mumbai and rang up Yogendra Yadav to find out more. ‘I am just entering the committee meeting. No decision has been taken yet, but I think we should go back to our voters and seek another referendum on the road ahead,’ he said. The idea of a ‘referendum’ was a unique AAP concept, designed to give a sense that the party was practising ‘true democracy’ by constantly talking to the citizens.

I was, as always, more cynical. ‘Well, whatever you do, I don’t see the need to resign when you have been in power for just a few weeks. You need to prove yourself to the people of Delhi still,’ I said, more worried that a sudden resignation would mean a long evening in the studio.

Yogendra seemed in agreement. ‘Yes, I agree with you. Best not to do anything in haste. That is exactly what I intend to tell Arvind.’ A few minutes later, our correspondent who was covering the AAP wanted to flash the news. ‘Sir, my sources inside AAP tell me that Arvind has already resigned.’ I told her of my conversation with Yogendra and how the issue was still not decided. My correspondent was insistent. She would be proven right. An hour later, close to 8 p.m., Kejriwal confirmed his resignation. It was prime time on TV!