Arvind Kejriwal is no dictator: Pran Kurup's new book looks at AAP as a start-up in politics

Pran Kurup, technology entrepreneur, former president of Silicon Valley India Professionals Association, was a batchmate of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal at IIT-Kharagpur and followed the setting up of AAP from close quarters. In Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party: An Inside Look(Bloomsbury), Kurup brings together both professional and personal insight to give a unique insight into AAP as a start-up in the political  space. Edited excerpts from an interview with Gargi Gupta, on Kejriwal, AAP and developments in the party:

Your idea of AAP as a political start-up is a novel one. Will you explain?

I have lived in Silicon Valley for a long time, and as I started to think more about Arvind’s story it occurred to me that there was no greater entrepreneur that I could have known. Except that it is in a new space— the political space. He has the grand vision, ability to articulate his vision passionately, argue his case and have people actually follow him. He had no resources and a big dream— the idea of a bhrashtachar mukt-Bharat is embedded in his head and no matter what happens he is always focused on that. Ultimately it is about faith and belief, taken to an extreme so that it seems almost foolish. But that's what makes them special.

AAP has until now been only about Kejriwal. How is Navjyot Singh Sidhu's possibly joining the party going to affect it?

I talk in my book about the open source model, and how AAP is akin to it. We associate only Linus Torvalds with Linux, but there are scores and scores of programmers and hackers around the world who have contributed to it. And in their own circles they have their own levels of respect. In Sidhu’s case, when he decides to come on board, my sense is, like anybody else, he will have to prove himself to a certain extent. It's not like we’ve not had people from other parties join AAP. The media and others tend to over-speculate. “Oh Sidhu’s coming in - he’s going to be CM candidate”. No reason for that. He’s going to come in like anybody. Like Kejriwal said, the most important criteria about being in AAP is that you have to be an aam admi. And that will stay.

You call AAP open source, but Kejriwal is criticised for being dictatorial.

Arvind is no dictator. Which dictator would allow people to walk in and out of the party, badmouth the party whenever they want to, however they want to. People have joined AAP on Twitter and left on Twitter. He knows that the dust will settle and truth will prevail. In the Lok Sabha elections, it was very clear that he did not want to contest but once his team said pushed for it, he said sure, I’ll go for it.

AAP is in the news for all the wrong reasons these days, with allegations against 10 of its MLAs, the Jan Lokpal bill in the cold storage, etc and Kejriwal only blames the Centre for everything.

The blame game is more to do with optics, but a lot of it, I have learnt, has to do with India's  pathetic administrative structure. For instance, how the NDMC is responsible for some roads and the Delhi government for others. Similarly, with drainage. And because of the tiff between AAP and the Centre, NDMC will not do anything that will make the AAP seem in a good light, and AAP will not do anything to make NDMC mad. Which is why I have heard Arvind often say that it is Delhi that is paying the price. 

You apply IIT lingo — gol funda (the happy-go-lucky students who don't care about results) and purna funda (steely, academic types focussed on ‘mugga’) — to analysis AAP. Yogendra Yadav, you say, was a purna funda guy and which is why he fell out with AAP

(Laughs) I say that he does not fit into the culture of the party. Yogendra is a great guy, very knowledgeable and all that. But in this day and age, kids are out there with their mobile phones. They don't have the time for history lessons. Which is bad, I agree with that.