Perhaps the most obvious, and therefore least noticed, feature of Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi is the way it has managed to surprise everyone with its longevity. It will complete one full year in office this Sunday!
When Kejriwal rode to power in February 2015, many, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, thought he would not last, the humongous majority notwithstanding. Not without reason though. History was on the naysayers’ side. Starting from his college days, Kejriwal had never stayed long enough to complete whatever he had begun. His 49-day first stint as Delhi’s chief minister in 2014 was, in a manner of speaking, the icing on that cake.
Modi had even coined a couple of pet phrases to describe Kejriwal. During his election campaign Modi had referred to him as “AK-49”, alluding to those 49 days, and a “bhagoda” or a runaway. (It is another matter that in electoral terms this particular ‘AK-49’ turned out to be deadlier for Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party than anything a Kalashnikov could have accomplished. And the “bhagoda” is proving to be, as the favourite expression in Hindi goes: “Lambey race ka ghoda” or the horse for the long race).
Be that as it may, Kejriwal seemed to have got carried away by the destructive abilities of that electoral Kalashnikov. He engaged Modi - or at least he thought he was engaging him - with a constant barrage of taunts and accusations culminating with that now-notorious tweet calling the prime minister a “psychopath” and a “coward”. And when Modi refused to react, he trained his guns on Arun Jaitley, considered the prime minister’s most trusted lieutenant in the government, with accusations of graft during an earlier period. Jaitley has promptly sued him for defamation with a tag of Rs100mn.
The AAP supremo is also fighting cases against the Lieutenant-Governor, Delhi police chief, his predecessor Sheila Dixit, the Delhi and District Cricket Association, several top bureaucrats and sundry others.
Kejriwal has realised that the Congress Party is not worth his attention any more as it is losing state after state in assembly elections and the prospect of it coming back to power at the federal level any time in the foreseeable future is extremely slim. So the target of his attack has to be Modi because only then could he claim to have the attention of all India. In Kejriwal’s scheme of things Delhi is only the first step to achieving his final goal, the prime ministership of India.
For a party that is in deep financial crisis - the past ten days have seen contributions at the rate of just Rs1,000 a day into its coffers while the election years of 2014 and 2015 saw a massive Rs447mn flowing in - how Kejriwal will pay up the Rs100mn if the court decides in Jaitley’s favour may possibly be weighing on the Delhi chief minister and his party. But that is perhaps the least of Kejriwal’s worries at the moment.
Caught in the cross-fire between the AAP and the BJP are the citizens of Delhi. They had voted overwhelmingly for Kejriwal in 2015 mainly for two reasons. One, they believed that Kejriwal would get down to work from day one and fulfil the big promises that he had made in his election manifesto. Two, after 15 years of the Sheila Dixit government anti-incumbency was weighing heavily on the Congress which spoiled its chances further with corruption scandals, mainly in the federal government. Kejriwal was seen as an agent of change. Hopefully for the better, everyone thought.
If you ask Kejriwal about fulfilment of the manifesto promises you are certain to get a very rosy description of his achievements. But that should remind you of what Sir Winston Churchill once said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
In Kejriwal’s book he could do no wrong. Did he not halve electricity bills of the poor in Delhi as was promised in the manifesto? And did he not successfully implement the odd-even road-sharing plan for private cars in an attempt to reduce pollution?
Yes, these are successes but with downsides that the chief minister or his party would not want to dwell on. After all, there was no rocket science involved in cutting power bills. All you need to do was issue the relevant order. But the economics of it is another matter. It is a subsidy and like all subsidies, the government has had to carry the can. Naturally, other development works would be affected. As for the odd-even effort, while it certainly reduced congestion on the road, the jury is still out on its overall effect on pollution.
But what about the rest of the promises? There were actually 70 of them in the manifesto, but let’s see a few major ones.
1. Water: Like electricity, this is one area where the government has delivered. The “free lifeline water” scheme has been implemented where every household with metered connection is receiving 20,000 litres of water free. But if it goes above that limit, then charges are due from bottom up. Good idea, implemented well. But it’s a dole and doles usually end up in the negative column in the long run.
2. Waste management: On Page 18 of the manifesto, the headline says: “Better waste management, a cleaner Delhi.” And it goes on to describe how the government would fund local bodies to collect and dispose of garbage, how it will ban plastic bags throughout the city and how recycling of waste would be streamlined. There is no need to waste further print space in this newspaper to tell you what has been happening in the past year. Delhi is perhaps the dirtiest capital city in the world at the moment!
3. Education: Page 19 of the manifesto has this to say: “State provision of equitable access to high quality education…Creation and expansion of world class universities and colleges for Delhi’s youth.” Kejriwal himself is on record saying he would not want to interfere with private schools, which “are doing quite well”, instead “the standard of education in government schools will be improved to that of the best private schools in the city”. And then what happened? Last month his government stopped all private schools from enrolling children as per their discretion and instead initiated his own set of rules. Thankfully the Delhi High Court stayed it from happening.
4. Healthcare: AAP will “improve and upgrade government healthcare facilities” and induct 4,000 new doctors and 15,000 paramedics “immediately”. Reality: Even the existing doctors and nurses have gone on strike at least twice in the past year and government hospitals continue to be known for spreading diseases rather than curing them!
5. Transport: The manifesto (page 35) says: “We will expand bus services in the city at a massive scale…we will improve connectivity through feeder services…” At the beginning of the year Delhi had 4,705 buses. But 1,300 of these, known as ‘cluster buses’, are contracted from private operators who have now given notice that they would not continue their service at the end of the contract citing poor implementation of the scheme. In fact, 120 buses owned by Star Bus Services Pvt Ltd have already gone off the road.
6. Wi-Fi: “We will make Wi-Fi freely available all over Delhi,” said the manifesto. That, along with the 1.5mn CCTV cameras for security of women and reviving the river Yamuna by stopping all untreated water from entering it are just some of the promises that the city’s people are waiting to see fulfilled.
These are early days yet to write a historical treatise on Kejriwal and the AAP. Democracy is often unreliable and at times totally crazy and can throw up many possibilities. The AAP may rule Delhi, or even all of India, for five or even ten years. Or it can blow itself up into pieces in the next year or two. But as the wag said, ‘each time history repeats itself, the price goes up’. The citizens of Delhi have already paid a high price till date. It may be cruel to ask them to shell out more.