Addressing party volunteers and supporters after the spectacular outcome of the Assembly elections in Delhi in February, Arvind Kejriwal had described the Delhi verdict as scary and warned against the danger of falling prey to arrogance. Looking at the developments within the AAP in the aftermath of the Delhi upsurge, one might think Kejriwal and his team are displaying precisely the signs of unremitting arrogance. First Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan were removed from the Political Affairs Committee and now they have also been removed from the National Executive Committee of the party. The two are not alone – included in the list are two other noted socialist activists – Prof. Anand Kumar and Ajit Jha.
Apart from the actual act of dropping these leaders – they were of course in a minority while Kejriwal commands the overwhelming majority on every level of the party – what has been particularly shocking is the manner in which it has been done. The substantive issues raised by Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan were never really addressed. In the National Council meeting, people were asked to sign a resolution dropping the dissenting leaders before the meeting started, the dissenting leaders and their supporters were humiliated and manhandled, allegedly by bouncers. The internal Lokpal of the party, Admiral Ramdas, who had been closely involved with the AAP since its inception, was also asked to stay away from the meeting and subsequently he too came to know from the media about his removal and the appointment of a new Lokpal panel.
While almost the entire legislative wing of the AAP has sided with Arvind Kejriwal, and some MLAs reportedly led the attacks on the dissenters, notable exceptions were Dharamveer Gandhi, AAP MP from Patiala and Pankaj Pushkar, AAP MLA from Timarpur, Delhi, who stood by Yadav and Bhushan and condemned the ‘murder of inner-party democracy’ in AAP in no uncertain terms. For Yadav and Bhushan the issues pertain to the violation of AAP’s own ‘founding principles’ – flawed choice of candidates in Delhi, the violation of ethical norms in matters of fund-raising and election management campaign and lack of transparency and inner-party democracy in decision-making. Some of the complaints were also taken up by the Lokpal and in a couple of cases the party also had to change candidates.
There were also questions concerning the political-tactical course of the party and its expansion – Kejriwal apparently did not agree to the ambitious scale of AAP’s Lok Sabha contests and Bhushan and Yadav did not agree to Kejriwal’s reported attempt, in the wake of the AAP’s failure to win any of the 7 Lok Sabha seats from Delhi, to avoid immediate elections and form a government with Congress support. According to the Kejriwal camp, Yadav and Bhushan wanted the party to lose in Delhi. Kejriwal himself accused the dissenters, Bhushan in particular, of ‘betrayal of trust’ and wanted the party to choose between him and the dissenters, thereby ruling out any process of political engagement or reconciliation. And the purge was finally sealed amidst the kind of rancour and ugliness that has put paid to AAP’s tall claims of ‘alternative politics’.
While Bhushan blames Kejriwal for his ‘dictatorial tendencies’ and the latter accuses the former of ‘breach of trust’, the rift should also be seen in the context of the political evolution and consolidation of AAP as a ruling party in Delhi. Yogendra Yadav who had come to be seen as a key ideologue of AAP, had described AAP as a post-ideological formation beyond the Left-Right ideological-political binary, which he said had become obsolete. Kejriwal too had described the party in more or less similar terms, as a ‘solution provider’ which was free to choose and combine aspects from both the Right and the Left. In spite of this abundant ideological ambiguity and flexibility, Kejriwal must have found the pro-socialist positions of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan difficult to accommodate and given the huge mandate in Delhi, he must have sensed this moment politically opportune to strike hard at the dissenting duo.
Just as the ouster and marginalisation of Subhas Bose and other leftists and socialists had exposed the myth of the so-called umbrella character of the pre-Independence Congress, the AAP, the fabled political home for social movements, also seems to have chosen to banish dissenting voices and oust leaders with socialistic leanings in a bid to consolidate itself as a mean between the Congress and the BJP. In a telling conjuncture, the ruthless suppression of dissent within AAP coincided with a shameful police assault on workers protesting at the Delhi Secretariat, demanding that the Chief Minister keep his promises to Delhi’s working class.
For socialists, social movement activists and citizens looking for a clean democratic and egalitarian politics, it is clearly a moment of reckoning and stock-taking. Activists like Medha Patkar and a host of others had embraced the AAP in the run-up to the last Lok Sabha elections, and significantly enough, Medha has now expressed her disillusionment and disapproval by resigning from the primary membership of AAP. With AAP evolving as yet another party of governance without the pretension of ‘alternative politics’, the time for dialogue and cooperation between the Left and disillusioned AAP activists has surely arrived.
