IANS/New Delhi
A new tape surfaced yesterday in which Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal purportedly slams senior leaders Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan and threatens to walk out of the party to form a new outfit.
The tape which found its way to TV channels, and whose authenticity could not be confirmed, has a voice seemingly of Kejriwal accusing Bhushan and Yadav of plotting the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) defeat in the Delhi assembly polls and threatening to walk out of the party.
The development further exacerbated the ongoing rift in the party.
AAP leaders, however, sought to dismiss it.
Senior leader Ashutosh said: “Anybody can say things when they are angry. Even when my father is angry, he says such things. This is a conspiracy.”
Prashant Bhushan, however, said: “It pains me to see the depth of animosity that Arvind has developed towards me and Yadav.
“It hurts me to hear such things,” he said.
Since storming to power in Delhi last month with a brute majority, the AAP has been embroiled in an internal crisis that has pitted Bhushan and Yadav against Kejriwal, the party’s best known face.
Earlier Bhushan and Yadav launched a tirade against Kejriwal, whose supporters accused them of being virtual BJP agents.
A day before the AAP’s national executive meets here, Bhushan and Yadav branded Kejriwal an autocrat surrounded by “yes men” and accused him of deviating from the party’s ideals.
The AAP hit back, accusing the two men of having tried to sabotage the party in the run up to the Delhi polls last month which it won handsomely.
“They made efforts so that party loses... they told workers ‘Let the party lose, it will be easy to remove Arvind’,” AAP member Ashish Khetan said.
“When the party was fighting an existential war, two leaders were trying to weaken it and malign its image,” he told reporters. “They tried to aid the formation of a BJP government.”
Yesterday’s war of words appeared to mark an end to whatever possibilities may have existed for the two camps to overcome their differences and shake hands.
Bhushan and Yadav said earlier that they were ready to give up all party posts if Kejriwal met their five demands -- including transparency within and autonomy to state units.
They addressed the media after Kejriwal supporters hit out at the two overnight, claiming they had resigned from the national executive. Both denied this.
“We have never made any attempt to dislodge Kejriwal from his position in the party. The allegations ... are all feeble and baseless,” said Yadav, a founder member of AAP like Kejriwal and Bhushan.
The main grouse of Bhushan and Yadav was that Kejriwal acted in an autocratic manner and refused to pay heed to dissenting voices in a party that was born in 2012 to give a new kind of politics to India.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal
