Madhu Bhaduri - How short can public memory be? // Hartosh Singh Bal: What Arvind Kejriwal's Speech at the National Council Meeting Tells Us about Him
NB: The observations by both these commentators are valid and far-reaching condemnations of the turn-around by the AAP leadership, and the overthrow of its own constitution by the founder of the party. What is of even greater significance to me, is the hooliganism and intimidation unleashed upon (perceived) critics by the cohorts of the Supreme Leader and reported by eye-witnesses (themselves AAP members). All this was not only highly objectionable but also totally unnecessary. Their aim of disciplining their critics could have been achieved without recourse to abuse, the use of muscle-men and disregard of democratic norms. That they felt the need to do all this, against the background of overwhelming victory and popular support signifies contempt for democracy, the right to criticise one's leaders, and the freedom of speech. If this is what the AAP can do to its own constitution, we may only guess what they will do to the constitution of India. I say all this as an AAP voter and supporter - DS
"...The convener of the party has within just 11 days and no niceties either changed the constitution of the party or trashed it.. Inside his own Party, the Convener of the party has done a somersault. On 19th March 2015, an official statement was made by the party expressing its full confidence in the internal Lokpal of the party Admiral (Retd) Ramdas... Eleven days later the same Lokpal was unceremoniously removed without informing him. ... the constitution of the Aam Admi Party clearly states that the outgoing Lokpal alone will nominate his successor within four weeks of his demitting office..."
"...The convener of the party has within just 11 days and no niceties either changed the constitution of the party or trashed it.. Inside his own Party, the Convener of the party has done a somersault. On 19th March 2015, an official statement was made by the party expressing its full confidence in the internal Lokpal of the party Admiral (Retd) Ramdas... Eleven days later the same Lokpal was unceremoniously removed without informing him. ... the constitution of the Aam Admi Party clearly states that the outgoing Lokpal alone will nominate his successor within four weeks of his demitting office..."
The hoardings have appeared overnight all over Delhi. They
show our newly-elected CM Kejriwal advising people to give bribes and record
the event. The advise is stunning, not only because the bribe takers are
being warned by him to be careful (of sting operation), also because the leader
has himself taken an about turn on his earlier stance in full public view.
He
was till recently an ardent campaigner for using the RTI Act to fight public
grievances including bribery. It was about this that he was awarded the
Magsaysay Award in 2006.
He was in fact, one of the major architects of the RTI Act
2005. Kejriwal had fought hard for the use of the penalty clause which allows a
system to be put in place to fight public grievances of all types not just the
giving and taking of bribes.
Why has this overwhelmingly elected leader trashed the system he himself architected and campaigned for? Instead he is now in
favour of advice to catch bribe takers by using mobiles? Such faith in the
gadget rather than a system is almost touching and even more touching is his
desire to turn the general population to behave as spies! What confusion this
video making can lead to if both sides take it seriously is still to be seen.
The CM and his enthusiastic supporters appear also to have
forgotten that all this started with the movement to bring about aJan Lokpal in
2011. Should we remind both sides that faith in the validity of the demand for
creation of an institution of Jan Lokpal had moved not only Delhi but several
other parts of the country also? The leaders of the movement had starved
themselves and made waves of popularity for creation of a Lokpal panel to be
nominated by the government, leaders of the opposition, the judiciary and also
public personalities of credibility.
Now our Chief Minister has turned out to
have an extraordinarily short memory. He has also chosen to turn blind to the
fact that Delhi is waiting for more than a year to have a lokayukt. He could
now make a move to nominate a Lokayukt for Delhi on the lines he recommended
(just four years ago) in consultation with the opposition, judiciary and
credible public personalities. Should we remind the people of Delhi and
Kejriwal that he resigned after 49 days as Chief Minister in February 2013 on
the excuse that he was unable to pass the Lokpal bill? That he then moved
immediately to Varanasi with all the resources and man power of the party to
fight a bigger battle for a bigger prize.
Inside his own Party, the Convener of the party has done a
somersault. On 19th March 2015, an official statement was made by the party
expressing its full confidence in the internal Lokpal of the party Admiral
(Retd) Ramdas. Eleven days later the same Lokpal was unceremoniously removed
without informing him. A panel of three people selected by the convener of the
party and stamped by his loyalists was nominated to replace Admiral Ramdas. It
is immaterial that the constitution of the Aam Admi Party clearly states that
the outgoing Lokpal alone will nominate his successor within four weeks of his
demitting office.
The convener of the party has within just 11 days and no
niceties either changed the constitution of the party or trashed it and taken
on himself the heavy responsibility of doing that with the support of his
loyalists after turning anyone who might come in his way out of the party. He
now stands tall and powerful with no one to question him.
The system of one man all posts, no responsibility or
accountability plus no memory is of its own kind. Our overwhelmingly elected
leader in an earlier incarnation of about 3-4 years back, swore by and wrote a
book on Swaraj. Along with Lokpal, that fuzzy notion of decentralisation of
power and people’s participation in decision making called Swaraj, has also
been dumped and forgotten.
There is hardly a part of the city where one is not
confronted by large images on a white background of Delhi’s Chief Minister
telling people not to refuse paying bribes but to record the event on video.
Bribe givers and bribe takers might have a short memory but our leader does not
appear to have any memory at all.
Be that of the RTI Act, the Jan Lokpal bill or the notion of
Swaraj. These were the three foundations of his past activities and his
declared principles of governance which brought him first into public view and
then to political power. He now has freed himself from all such heavy baggage
of the past and no memories of them either. The path chosen now is exemplified
by his faith in secret recordings through cell phones ( after all he has been
stung by it)! We remember that in the National Council meeting of AAP on 28
March no one was allowed to carry a cell phone or camera to record the
unbecoming proceedings inside.
Only a carefully edited version of Kejriwal and his speech
was made available on the TV, like these officially paid advertisements that
are shells without substance glorifying him as a fighter against corruption. (The author is an AAP founder member)
http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-commentary/how-short-can-public-memory-be/Hartosh Bal: What Kejriwal's Speech at the National Council Meeting Tells Us about Him
On 24 November 2012, Arvind Kejriwal announced the formation of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which was formally launched two days later. Photographs of the press conference in the next day’s Mail Today showed him standing next to Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan, and the accompanying article described the structure of this organisation. It was to be managed by a national executive that would be selected by the national council members who were chosen from among the founder members of the party. According to Yadav, the national executive would be the highest decision-making body, à la the politburo in communist parties.
It was an appropriate choice of words. More than two years later, on 28 March 2015, in a feat worthy of most communist parties across the world, Yadav and Bhushan were expelled from the national executive in a show carefully choreographed by Arvind Kejriwal, the party’s national convenor and the equivalent of the general secretary in this politburo.
For nearly a century, the term politburo has gone hand in hand with the sudden and traumatic exit of some of its most prominent members who had fallen out of favour with the general secretary. In rigidly controlled states such as the erstwhile USSR, these exits mandated no explanation to the general public. However, public memory often extends beyond what it is allowed to articulate, and this meant that the party would employ means that were as crude as they were effective to suppress it. Those fallen out of favour were unceremoniously removed from the photographic records of the state. But even such an erasure was rarely perfect. Removing a figure from a photograph required filling in the background, and sometimes a smudge here or there was enough to give the game away.
On 29 March, the AAP released a video tape of what it claimed was the actual version of events that transpired during the meeting. Compared to a doctored photograph, it was a subtler attempt to manipulate the truth in an environment that the national convenor or his party still don’t control. But like the doctored photographs, a careful examination of the speech released by an increasingly intolerant and autocratic national convenor revealed more than it was meant to.
Some of these revelations are interesting on their own merit. It is good to know that Narendra Modi is not the only demagogue with a large ego in this country who likes referring to himself in the third person. It is even more reassuring to realise that a party claiming to practice transparency and inner-party democracy believed its national convenor’s speech was the only matter worthy of being made public from the proceedings of a crucial meeting of the national council.
But even more telling than these straightforward observations was the manipulation of facts by Kejriwal in the course of the speech. It was the seemingly insignificant claims—not unlike the faint smudges on a doctored photograph—that aroused suspicion of his motives. During the speech, as Kejriwal spoke of the faith he had reposed in Prashant Bhushan, he referred to the day in court when he was asked to submit a personal bond in a case of defamation last year. Not knowing what this was, he looked towards Bhushan who shook his head asking him to decline. Such was his faith in Bhushan, Kejriwal would have us believe, that a mere shake of the head by Bhushan was enough for him to spend several days in Tihar jail.
This is a strange claim, particularly because it comes from a man who boasted of being a one-time income tax commissioner in this very speech. What kind of a commissioner was he? Did he never pursue an income tax case? Did he not know the very basics of law every government servant is required to know?
Through the speech he oscillated between his purported desire to renounce the post and his anger at any attempt to oust him. He cited an earlier instance when he had decided to resign from the post of the national convenor and claimed that Bhushan and Yadav were the ones who forced him to change his mind. This suggests that when the duo tried to persuade him to stay on for the sake of the party he believed in their sincerity and acted according to their demands, when they tried to persuade him to vacate the post; he wrote their demands off as self-serving. If Kejriwal is to be taken at his word, he does not desire the post, yet he comes across as someone who relishes holding on to it.
Kejriwal went on to refer to the Solomonic story of a mother who chose to part with her child rather than risk any harm to it when another claimant appeared before the king. But judging from his recorded conversation a few days earlier—which the party has not denied—he had threatened to establish a new party in Delhi with those who supported him. This is rather like saying he would tear away three-fourths of the baby and rename it.
The facts of the matter do not suggest that Yadav or Bhushan were acting solely on principle either. They too seemed more enthusiastic about damaging Kejriwal than strengthening the party, but it is the duplicity inherent in Kejriwal’s self-serving speech that is startling. His ambition is not a problem, theirs is. His desire for power is not a problem, theirs is.
As soon as he finished his speech, Kejriwal had to rush off for an important meeting. We are still to learn what was so important and why it had come up all of a sudden. Why was it that he could not wait to hear what his opponents had to say at a meeting of the national council? This man, who walked off with an ultimatum to his party—with me or against me—was the same man who had earlier made it a point to project that all decisions were taken collectively. He had made sure the party went through a charade of public meetings with its volunteers on a number of issues, from the party's conundrum over whether it should take support from the Congress in forming a government to his subsequent resignation from the post of chief minister.
At the end of the speech we are left with a greater sense of the remarkable political phenomenon that is Arvind Kejriwal. It is clear now why, over his long career, he has gained from his involvement with successive political causes such as the Right to Information Act or the Lokpal, while others who have contributed as much, if not more, have been left behind. It is clear that he is no democrat, neither is he someone who has much faith in a consultative process, these convenient fictions have already served his end in the party.
Now that the fig leaf of principles has been shed along with Bhushan and Yadav, he will no longer be seen as a politician who stood apart. He has taken his place among the other political figures in this country who are also largely motivated by their desire for power. The chief minister of Delhi and the national convener of the AAP has ensured that the party will now function according to his will, and the latest purge serves as an indication of the fate that awaits those who decide to challenge him. The only question that now remains is, what, if anything, does Kejriwal stand for, apart from himself?
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/what-arvind-kejriwal-speech-national-executive-meeting-tells-us-about-him
see also
