Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in Ahmedabad (Photo: Screengrab from the Aam Aadmi Party's YouTube channel)
I have generally regarded politics as a gladiatorial sport; now more so than ever before. The latest gladiator charging the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) smug certitudes is Delhi Chief Minister and founder of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Arvind Kejriwal.
Kejriwal is the first major politician not only to emerge in my long absence from India but someone whom I have had to observe from afar, a little over 12,000 kilometers to be precise. It is an interesting view.
The first thing that strikes me is that he is perhaps the first politician that I know of whose grandstanding is at such street, microlevels. Kejriwal’s grandiosity can come across as infuriatingly small to many. I am conscious that grandiosity by its very definition cannot be small but he has managed to do so.
I was watching his address in Ahmedabad, my hometown, to an audience that prominently featured the city’s autorickshaw drivers. I am discovering that Kejriwal enjoys a great deal of affection among the autorickshaw drivers of Delhi and Punjab. To those he is rapidly adding, it seems, those from Gujarat. The audience was in Kejriwal’s thrall, especially the rickshaw drivers. It is a constituency that traditionally does not get seen, let alone acknowledged. In terms of numbers, it is nowhere big enough to be electorally consequential but in their ability as carriers of societal angst and aspirations rikshawallahs are extraordinarily effective.
The filmmaker Manmohan Desai once told me that he regarded Bombay’s rickshaw drivers as his ultimate focus group and arbiters. “Rikshawaleh ko picture pasand aayi maney samjho ke picture hit hai. (If a rickshaw driver likes a movie, then assume that the movie is a hit),” he told me. In a sense, Arvind Kejriwal is the Manmohan Desai of Indian politics. He too sells theater of the absurd with such gusto that for a short while people believe him.
I have no firsthand experience from the ground but it would seem to me that he is not all-fibbing when it comes to his accomplishments in Delhi. He does seem to have done well in some areas of Delhi’s governance, especially in transforming public schools and government-run hospitals. I caveat it again to say that this is not my firsthand assessment.
Another thing that strikes me about Kejriwal is that he infuriates his antagonists as much as Prime Minister Narendra Modi does his. He gets as much under the skin of Modi camp-followers as Modi does his. One cannot stand the other. Both excel at lacing their grandstanding with promises which are just that—promises. Both would insist they mean what they say and say what they do. Once again, I am not on the ground to make an informed assessment as a professional journalist. However, going by how the rival constituencies of Modi and Kejriwal have nothing but visceral, unvarnished contempt for the other it would seem that both are telling at least some half-truths.
To the extent that in any democracy, especially like India, Modi and his chief spinmeister, Home Minister Amit Shah, ought to have a political counter who can at least attempt to out-spin and out-fib, Kejriwal’s rise is essential. I told you I see politics as a gladiatorial sport. Whether either of them is good for India is incidental to this particular post.
Unlike Congress Party grandee Rahul Gandhi, who brings an argument to a rhetorical gunfight, Kejriwal brings the same set of oratorial weapons as Modi. Add to those his ability to find resonance at levels of Indian society which generally get overlooked and you have the making of an interesting counter political force to the Modi-Shah juggernaut.
Kejriwal’s carefully cultivated middle class persona, shorn of the obvious appurtenances of raw power of the kind Modi exudes, has the potential to lift him and his party to a position of greater consequence not just in the prime minister’s and Shah’s home state and a sort of personal political fiefdom of Gujarat but even nationally. Even visually and sartorially Kejriwal chooses to project a sharp contrast with the one whom he considers his main challenge, Modi. The latter, of course, has become known for his sartorial obsessions. Kejriwal is the antithesis of that.
At a personal level, my overarching impression of Kejriwal, every time I see him is that he is either on the verge of having it or has just had a particularly satisfying meal.
I do not know if AAP will make any significant gains in Gujarat’s upcoming state assembly elections or whether in 2024, when national elections will be called, his party will emerge as a force to reckon with. So far, his game seems to be to punch far above his weight by employing all his innate craftiness and then some more. Had his party’s symbol not been a broom (jhadu), he could have also gone for a rickshaw. It is a vehicle terribly efficient for Indian roads and carries within it a sense of ordinary joys such listening to hit Hindi cinema songs.
Speaking of songs and rickshaws, I remember the expression of unbridled joy on the face of a rickshaw driver who was transporting me from Juhu to Bandra sometime in 1982 with the song ‘My name is Anthony Gonsalves’, the blockbuster hit from Manmohan Desai’s huge hit ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’, blaring full volume. By a remarkable coincidence, I had hailed the rickshaw just outside the bungalow of the superstar Amitabh Bachchan recuperating from a nearly fatal onset injury for one of that very Desai’s movie called ‘Coolie’. ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ was released in 1977.