Collapse of the AAP Mirage: From Anna's Square to the Ruins of a Broken Promise |
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The departure of seven MPs from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is unfolding a situation that is bruising, public and irreversible. It admittedly elicits a vicarious sense of justice among those who watched the AAP weaponise falsehood against the Congress for over a decade. The lies were elaborate, the propaganda industrious, and the damage real. Schadenfreude, in this instance, is not an entirely dishonourable emotion.
And yet, two wrongs have never made a right. Alongside this spectacle of self-implosion runs a far more sinister story: the BJP’s continued practice of purchasing mandates through lure and coercion, of engineering defections, of bending democratic institutions to achieve what Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideologues have long dreamed of: a single-party state.
The AAP crisis cannot be allowed to obscure that existential threat to Indian democracy.
The promise that was never meant to be kept
Let’s recall 2011. A man in a Gandhi topi stood at Jantar Mantar and spoke of an India scrubbed clean of corruption. Arvind Kejriwal had won the Magsaysay Award for championing the Right to Information. He had filed a signed affidavit pledging never to use an official car or government bungalow. He had demanded a Lokpal so powerful it could, in the words borrowed from his Janlokpal Bill, “break open the almirahs of the Prime Minister.”
Gullible, idealistic, genuinely good-hearted Indians believed him. They believed because they wanted to believe.
Today, that same man travels in large cavalcades at public expense. He fought bitterly in court to secure a Lutyens’ Delhi bungalow. His official chief minister’s residence was refurbished at a cost that scandalised even his admirers.
Also read: Arvind Kejriwal Should Realise the Allure of Jantar Mantar is Misplaced
As admin incharge of the Congress Party, I may also take the liberty of sharing that no top leader of Congress has ever misused public funds to have a luxurious living. The bungalows belonging to the Gandhi’s even have a spartan style. People were merrily amused to see the kitchen of Sonia Gandhi, when Rahul Gandhi released a video discussing food with his mother. It was simply a middle-class kitchen of the 80s. Frugal living!
The Lokpal that Kejriwal........