The Blunders of Kejriwal

Arvind Kejriwal had waded into the now-ongoing Indian general elections with his eyes set on the moon. But the writing on the wall is that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader will have to content himself with a few pebbles accidentally washed ashore for him.

Kejriwal will be the biggest loser of the Indian elections. The formal confirmation will come on May 16 when the votes are counted after the 9-phase marathon poll process, which started on April 7, comes to an end on May 12.

AAP has fielded candidates in 440 constituencies out of total 543 Lok Sabha seats. But it will be a miracle if the party gets even into double digits when the results are announced on May 16. The extremely low ratings given by bookies to Kejriwal is a case in point. Kejriwal is set to lose his own seat from Varanasi where he is pitted against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and Congress party’s Ajay Rai, a sitting MLA from the area.
Varanasi has got completely polarized and chances are that the voters there will be voting on communal lines — Hindu votes going in favor of Modi while the Muslim voters pitching for the Congress. In this tactical battle of the ballot, Kejriwal seems to be completely out of depth and the only relevant question is how big his defeat margin is going to be.
Even in Delhi, where AAP’s dream debut started as a political party just four months ago, Kejriwal’s party is unlikely to get more than one or two seats out of seven. However, to the credit of AAP, the new-born party is likely to poll higher number of votes than the Congress in most of Delhi constituencies.

So, what has gone wrong for Kejriwal and AAP? Kejriwal has committed five major blunders, many of which he himself and his top aides have confessed to.

Kejriwal’s first blunder, which triggered the avalanche for him and his party, was his impulsive decision to quit as Delhi chief minister on Feb. 14, his 49th day in office. This act of desertion of responsibilities prompted Modi to acerbically describe Arvind Kejriwal as AK 49. Kejriwal himself has admitted that it was a mistake to have resigned at that point of time and he ought to have waited for more days and tried to gauge the public opinion on the issue before resigning.
For his part, Kejriwal was being politically shrewd as he wanted to be a free bird, contest more than 400 seats with the hope of repeating his Delhi assembly polls antics and emerging as the king maker, if not the king himself, in the general elections. But he is destined to end up as a novice in politics.

His second blunder was to contest from 440 seats. No start-up political party fields candidates from 440 out of 543 Lok Sabha seats in its debut general election. Even the grand old party, Congress, has fielded lesser candidates, 420 to be precise.
By spreading his poll dragnet to 440 seats, he has stretched his resources too much too far and risking losing the very base he started from. He ought to have given a deep focus attention on 50 or 100 select constituencies and try to have a winning ratio of 70-80 per cent, a doable thing.
Kejriwal’s aide Prashant Bhushan has admitted that AAP has indeed stretched itself too thin.

Third blunder of Kejriwal was to dream big and set his eyes on the top job of prime minister, barely two months after he ran away from discharging his responsibilities of a chief minister.
None other than his one-time mentor and benefactor Anna Hazare has gone on record as saying that Kejriwal quit Delhi as he wanted to become the prime minister.

His fourth blunder is that he has made more and more enemies while steadily losing friends and admirers. This smack of megalomania and no politician can survive with this kind of delusional feeling of being a Superman.

Kejriwal’s fifth blunder is that much like Anna Hazare he has started sounding like a broken record where everybody is corrupt except him and his party members. His every speech begins and ends with the same content where he is pointing his fingers at problems but does not give solutions.

When he had a whale of an opportunity to demonstrate to the people of India of identifying the problems and removing them one by one, he turned an escapist and resigned as Delhi chief minister without any credible reason or provocation.

Kejriwal needs to reinvent himself if he really wants to cleanse the system. After the elections, he needs to take a break and mull over how to do it. Even the 74-year-old Anna Hazare has been talking about setting up his own political party to contest general elections, but not today or tomorrow. Instead Hazare has been talking about contesting elections in 2019 or even 2024! Why should Kejriwal be in such a tearing hurry? He is just 45. more