Power has appallingly infected the Aam Aadmi Party

For an ordinary politically powerless citizen, there is something quite pleasurable, a pleasure bordering on the illicit perhaps, in watching politicians wash their dirty laundry in public. Besides free entertainment, the spectacle offers insight into the machinations of power and, almost as a rule of the thumb, confirms our worst fears about politicians. 

Rarely do such public political spats lead to public disappointment but when they do it is impossible to judge whether the politicians have let the electorate down or whether the public has fooled itself with a flight of fancy. Case in point: the open infighting amongst the top ranks of the Aam Aadmi Party.

The day Delhi handed the AAP a blank cheque giving it 67 seats out of 70 who would have imagined that for close to a year AAP’s top leadership was not even on talking terms, that AAP leaders were planting stories against each other in the press, that AAP leaders were recording each other’s phone conversations, that Arvind Kejriwal would find himself exposed in one such sting operation?

One evening last week, I chanced upon an interview of AAP’s leader Kumar Vishwas on a Hindi news channel. The interview, which went on for close to half an hour, convinced me that not only was Vishwas a mediocre poet but that he also belonged to a breed of politicians that AAP and its volunteers had banded together to fight. Talking a mile-a-minute, Vishwas appeared to be wholly lacking in integrity, avoided all the difficult questions, attempted unnecessary rhyme, and forever came across as a shallow human being who believes that speaking loudly is as good as speaking the truth, that the acquisition of power is the sole end of a life in politics. I knew I could not trust him with my vote, ever.

Over the next few days as I watched a number of Arvind Kejriwal loyalists on television and read their statements in the papers, I was convinced that within a month of coming to power, the AAP has transformed itself from a self-righteous political movement to a self-righteous political party which traded its fundamental principles for popular support. Doubtless when the situation got tough for AAP, the tough in AAP got desperate and the desperate elements, like the theme of Anurag Kashyap’s last film, got really ugly.

Going by the current developments, it is possible that peace will be brokered among the warring factions in the party and that some semblance of order will be restored within the AAP but the AAP will never be the same again. I doubt if Arvind Kejriwal will ever speak openly about the horse-trading charges levelled against him or will ever come clean about the funding discrepancies highlighted by Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav. Inner party democracy has never worked for any political party in the country and it appears that the AAP has picked up the traits of the political beast quite early. Slowly but surely Kejriwal is going to get more powerful within the party and as a result his politics will tend towards hypocrisy shrouded in excellent oratory and public image construction. And no matter how hard the AAP tries to work its way out of the mess it finds itself in, it is not going to be easy denying the irony in a simple truth: within a month of coming to power the AAP finds itself infected with the same disease it had set out to eradicate.