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Shabby dishonesty is often the last refuge of political defectors, and Raghav Chadha’s claim that Arvind Kejriwal has turned his new official residence as leader of the opposition in Delhi  into a second “Sheesh Mahal” bears all the marks of a convenient falsehood. Crafted to cloak his own betrayal – and that of six other Aam Aadmi Party MPs – in the language of outrage, his assertion is a bald-faced lie. 

How can I be so sure?

First, because I visited Kejriwal at his new home and am therefore able to compare the changes that the Delhi government (under a BJP chief minister) has made to it with what it was originally.

Second, I am familiar with its former layout because I was a frequent visitor to the two adjoining houses in the same row that I had visited frequently over the previous 50 years.

Third, because I had lived in an identical house at 17, Kasturba Gandhi Lane (then Curzon Lane), as a child from 1948 till 1950. 

All of these houses had been designed on a single pattern and had been intended for deputy secretary-level officers of the British colonial government. 96, Lodhi Estate (located on Lodhi Road) was the residence of Krishan Bhatia, editor of the Hindustan Times,  when I joined the paper in1966. 97, Lodhi Estate is where Shashi Tharoor has been living after joining the Manmohan Singh government in 2009. These homes, and the one I lived in, were identical in design to 6, Flagstaff Road, where Kejriwal insisted upon living when he was the chief minister of Delhi. Kejriwal had forsaken not only Raj Nivas in old Delhi, where chief secretaries of the capital had stayed in British times, but also 3, Motilal Nehru Road where his predecessor Sheila Dikshit had stayed. 

Kejriwal’s present home occupies about the same floor space as the three homes described above. What has been added to it is a separate two-room office for his staff and visitors, and probably (because I did not see them) some quarters for his security detail at the back, where the servants’ quarters of the original house used to be. His reception room is bare of artefacts to the point of being stark. There are no comfortable sofas, no paintings on the walls, and no memorabilia on its side tables to relieve its severity. If the rest of the house has been similarly refurbished, it is the very opposite of a luxurious residence, let alone the ‘Sheesh Mahal 2’ that defector Raghav Chadha has called it. 

The real story of the defections 

Chadha was one of Kejriwal’s blue-eyed boys, and no defection has hurt him as much as his has. The main reason for his defection appears simple – it is blackmail by the BJP. This blackmail, like so much more that has preceded it during the past eight years, has been made possible by one unforgivable omission in the constitution. That is the lack of any provision for the legal financing of elections in the largest constituencies of the democratic world. 

This lacuna was made more acute by the ban on corporate donations to political parties that was enacted by a then inexperienced prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in 1969. That ban tore down the walls that had remained till then between crime and politics. After that, politicians had to break the law if they wanted to raise the money to fight an election. Over five-and-a half decades, that ban has criminalised Indian politics beyond repair. 

Till the BJP came to power in 2014, there had been a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ among all parties not to take advantage of this to attack opposition leaders, because all of them were culpable to the same extent. But the Modi government broke this tacit agreement, amending the Prevention of Money Laundering Act to reverse the burden of proof in law and using allegations of undeclared income and expenditure to break opposing parties like the Nationalist Congress Party and the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, and jail powerful opponents in other states where the BJP wanted to come to power. 

Given the cases that had already been filed against them in various courts because of their murky records as the chief and home minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah must have realised that the citizens’ rights and freedoms that they were taking away, notably of habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence, could one day be used against them. The speed and thoroughness with which they destroyed these was therefore the most unequivocal warning that the parties of the opposition could have received that their purpose, from the very beginning, was to destroy India’s democracy. But this obvious conclusion was not voiced till very recently, and still has not been acted upon, by a........

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