Aam Aadmi to Avocado Aadmi

THE AVOCADO, CALLED ‘BUTTER FRUIT’ IN INDIA FOR ITS FATTY, tasteless butteriness, was first introduced here by American missionaries in the early 20th century. Mostly planted in the hill stations of Tamil Nadu, the avocado failed to take off as the ordinary Indian’s preferred choice of fruit in­take. Today, still largely imported for fine-dining, the avocado figures on menus for the affluent and in multinational cuisine. But the most popular dish is the guacamole from Mexico, where the fruit originates, apart from being grown in the West Indies and Guatemala. It remains an acquired taste even today in the subcontinent.

The tangy-sweet mango, on the other hand, is the antithesis of the avocado. The fruit has been grown in the subcontinent for over 4,000 years, and spread to South India (where it became aam kaaya and then maam kaay or manga, and later mango in Portuguese and thereby introduced to the world) from the north-eastern region. It was used by Buddhists as a fruit of diplomacy and gifts, planted by the Mauryan kings on wide street sides, written about by Xuanzang and Megasthenes, mentioned in the Puranas and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

An enthralled Alexander carried many varieties back to Greece. Almost every Indian kid, over generations, has memories of stealthily stone-pelting the unripe green fruit in a neighbour’s garden and relishing it on the sly with salt and chilli pepper. And everyone has memorable recollections of the first time they dug into the ripe fruit impatiently, the sweet and tangy juice dripping down their chin, unfettered and in exhilarating freedom. It is to­day the national fruit and delight of every ordinary Indian. In other words, the mango is wholly Indian.

Metamorphosing from the mango to the avocado seamlessly is an impossible feat but the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief and former Delhi chief minister—once hailed by the media as a po­litical champion who trounced the Goliaths of the day, a people’s man with simple middle-class origins and an obvious connect with the ordinary citizens of the national capital—has managed exactly that with a sleight of hand. Early into his second term, Arvind Kejriwal dumped his iconic muffler and red sweater, chose sartorial élan over old dressing habits, and gave up the loose creaseless trousers. How he weaponised his ‘ordinary’ attire politically—his sloppy pants, untucked shirts and casual foot­wear—was clear when top Indian designers and image managers endorsed his choice of clothing as echoing the common man’s no-nonsense and comfy style as well as striking a chord with voters.

His steady old ₹6 lakh worth Maruti Suzuki Wagon R, mean­while, reportedly ballooned into an entire fleet of cars, including a 2017 model Toyota Innova Crysta worth over ₹30 lakh, a Toyota Fortuner worth ₹35 lakh, and a Mahindra Alturas worth ₹28 lakh. In his election affidavit, though, Kejriwal declared that he does not own a car but his wife Sunita Kejriwal owns a Suzuki Baleno. He seems to lean, nonetheless, to moving in SUVs. In the affida­vit, the former chief minister also declared a family net worth of ₹4.2 crore which, compared to the ₹3.4 crore net worth declared five years ago, shows an increase of ₹1.3 crore. He also has declared non-agricultural land with a current market value of ₹1.7 crore at Indirapuram, Ghaziabad.

Although he had vowed to continue residing in the National Capital Region (NCR) at his own home even as chief minister, he moved to Delhi and into the official residence of the chief min­ister later, citing logistical problems. He may have seen little op­tion but to resign as chief minister after he was jailed on charges of scamming the people of Delhi, but Kejriwal’s preference for Lutyens’ Delhi and its bungalows was unmistakable even after he was released on bail. He now occupies a bungalow allotted to an AAP MP at the centre of the capital on Feroz Shah Road. From a ‘humble’ Uriah Heep-type—Charles Dickens’ character in David Copperfield who sported a highly exaggerated humility— Kejriwal has practically transmogrified into a rich potentate as­piring to a gold-domed palace.

The audit report for the renovation of his ‘Sheesh Mahal’— a flashy house of gleaming glass as the then chief minister’s grandiosely made-over official residence at 6, Flagstaff Road was dubbed by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) leadership— has exposed the extravagant spends Kejriwal had indulged in. The lavish expenses included an 88-inch OLED TV costing ₹28.9 lakh, 10 Sony OLED TVs for ₹43.9 lakh; Samsung multi-door refrigerators, and two steam ovens costing around ₹12 lakh; Jacuzzi, sauna and spa at a cost of ₹20 lakh; 75 Bose ceil­ing speakers; a mini bar; 50 indoor air conditioners in spaces like the gym—all in a bungalow spread over 21,000 sq ft that includes eight bedrooms, three meeting rooms, two kitch­ens and 12 bathrooms. And the price of the main and sheer curtains hiding the grandeur within the official manor? ₹96 lakh, a mind-boggling price to pay for purdahs to hide the reality of the man from the public.

Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Girish Chandra Murmu estimated the total spends on Sheesh Mahal at ₹33.66 crore, almost four times the initial renovation estimate of ₹7.91 crore when it was assigned to the Public Works Depart­ment (PWD) in 2020. The work on the residence was completed in 2022. Conveniently, the CAG report has yet to be tabled in the Assembly before the elections on February 5.

At a pre-poll campaign in Delhi on January 3, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a scathing attack on Kejriwal’s hy­pocrisy and profligacy. Highlighting his government’s achieve­ments in housing for the poor, he said, “The country knows that Modi never built a house for himself, but I have ensured that over four crore poor families got their own homes.” Modi had inaugurated 1,675 new apartments for slum dwellers in jhuggi-jhopri (JJ) clusters earlier in the day and personally handed over keys to beneficiaries at ‘Swabhiman Apartments’ at Ashok Vihar. Pointing to the stark contrast in priorities, he asserted, “I could have built a palace, but my priority has always been the people.” He added that AAP had turned the national capital into an “aapda (disaster)” zone for a whole decade, making life difficult and un­liveable for its residents. Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva and North West Delhi MP Yogender Chandoliya also alleged that around 50,000 apartments for the poor built by the Centre in places like Bawana lie dilapidated solely because Kejriwal chose not to allot them to eligible beneficiaries. Against this backdrop, Modi maintained, “2025 will mark a new era of good governance for Del­hi and make it a place for its entire population to live happily.”

The catchy aapda jibe caught on among vot­ers and BJP leaders mocking Kejriwal’s claims. BJP swiftly released a three-part ‘Sankalp Patra’ for Delhi to checkmate the unnerved AAP leadership with a smorgasbord of smartly targeted welfare promises that left the Kejriwal platoon gasping for breath. Apart from committing to continue all existing welfare schemes— Kejriwal had repeatedly claimed BJP would shut them down if vot­ed to power—Union Home Minister Amit Shah, at a rally on Janu­ary 25, vowed to clean up the Yamuna in three years and provide complete ownership rights in 1,700 unauthorised colonies, and announced a slew of welfare measures for gig workers and labour­ers. Upping the ante on AAP and its leader, the BJP manifesto also promised free travel of up to ₹4,000 annually for needy students on Delhi Metro under the National Common Mobility Card scheme. This, with just two weeks to go for polling day on February 5.

BJP also showcased its concern for women voters prominently, earlier promising ₹21,000 each for pregnant women, ₹5,000 for the first child, and ₹6,000 for the second child. The pledges further ce­mented BJP’s first mover advantage on the welfare front as with other states, ranging from Haryana to Rajasthan and Maharashtra (free rations for the eligible poor, the Ayushman Bharat Yojana for medical and health support, the Ladli Behna scheme, etc). These were distinctly publicised as welfare schemes for the most eligible poor as opposed to freebies forked out liberally to lure voters by AAP.

Grabbing eyeballs off Kejriwal and gaining the upper hand in capturing the popular imagination in such a short time—with the big push over the line from Modi, and despite not projecting a chief ministerial face—is indeed huge. To position itself as the key challenger after a gap of 26 years (the last time BJP was in power in Delhi was in 1998 with Sushma Swaraj as chief minister) is a monumental achievement. But the BJP leadership was helped in no mean manner by Kejiwal’s ‘I, Me, Myself’. Forced to face jail time, his original plan was reportedly to go the Lalu Prasad way and install his wife Sunita as chief minister although he publicly swears against dynastic politics. He later plumped for ardent loy­alist Atishi who even addresses press conferences seated next to an empty chair awaiting Kejriwal’s return.

BJP has been helped by the heat on Kejriwal in several allegations of scams and the fact that he is out on bail to campaign. None of this is likely to be music to voters’ ears, not least the court order that Kejriwal cannot go to his (erstwhile) office or sign official papers.

The expenditure on advertisements by Delhi’s AAP is shock­ing. During the pandemic year 2020-21 alone, it spent a budget estimate of ₹293 crore (revised estimate ₹355.33 crore) on ad­vertisements on TV, radio and in newspapers. This is in itself is ₹93.2 crore more than its spends in 2019-20, a 2,500 per cent in­crease from the ad spend in 2012-13 when the Sheila Dikshit-led government spent ₹11.18 crore on advertisements.

In mid-2023, the Supreme Court had observed that if the Kejriwal government could spend ₹1,100 crore on ads, “certainly contributions can be made to infrastructure projects”. The refer­ence was to the RRTS connecting Delhi, Meerut and Ghaziabad, where payments were overdue and the government had pleaded its inability to pay. Justice SK Kaul had warned then: “[E]ither pay up or we will attach your advertising budget.” The affidavit he directed the Delhi government to pay on its ad spends over the previous three years revealed the total to be a whopping ₹1,073 crore. Again, during the pandemic years 2020-22, the Kejriwal government reportedly spent ₹68 lakh on a ‘bio-decomposer spray’ to reduce the effect of stubble burning. But just on ads for this project alone, it spent another ₹23 crore.

It was not just by media ads and through social media influenc­ers that Kejriwal spread his own, his party’s and his government’s PR, projecting AAP as a political startup that grew leaps and bounds in both performance and public trust. He put a high-profile and trusted PR and media manager in place to work the magic with the public. Vijay Swaminathan Nair is one of the accused, alongside Manish Sisodia, in the multi-crore Delhi Excise Liquor Policy scam. Well known as a big operator in the entertainment business and a highly networked man in the sector and its offshoots, including the liquor industry, Nair was a ‘volunteer’ for AAP for almost a decade. His association with both Kejriwal and Sisodia grew close enough for him to become the key contact guy and one-stop shop for all things media and AAP. He ensured AAP’s Delhi government hiked its media advertisement spends by a whopping 4,000 per cent over 10 years. Such spending was aimed directly at hyping the party’s image, Kejriwal’s policies and welfare schemes for the capital’s poor, his ‘impressive’ containment of the pandemic, and so on. In financial year 2021-22, the Kejriwal government spent ₹488 crore in wooing media groups, placing full-page repeat ads and re-run videos that boasted of AAP’s achievements with no respect for facts. The figures were disclosed by the Delhi government in response to a Right to Information (RTI) inquiry.

Nair was the all-powerful PR guru of the Kejriwal government and even wielded enough power to ensure a market-leader newspa­per started sporting close to 10 pages of city news compared to only two pages of national news. In every decision associated with the management of Delhi’s media—print, broadcast and online—Nair was AAP’s and Kejriwal’s go-to man. Today, Nair is out on bail but, according to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), he was a key conduit for channelling money made illegally by waiving the fees of liquor licence holders and granting undue favours to private parties as part of the Kejriwal government’s new liquor policy.

ARVIND KEJRIWAL HAS often been described as a maverick; a disruptor; a non-conformist; a chaotic and ideological heretic by those who know him. Many recall him as incapable of working in a team and a micromanager by nature. He joined the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) as an assistant commissioner in 1995 but quit his post as joint commissioner of income tax (IT) in New Delhi in just over a decade. Within just four years of joining IRS he, along with Sisodia, had founded a “people’s movement” called Parivartan in 1999, ostensibly fo­cusing on issues like PDS delivery, electricity supply and other welfare services. Soon, Kejriwal was spending more time on work relating to Parivartan than on his official assignment.

While still a serving bureaucrat, Kejriwal targeted his own department of IT. Parivartan filed a PIL against lack of transpar­ency in the public dealings of the IT department, following that up with a sit-in protest outside the chief commissioner’s office. Alleged bribes to electricity department officials were also high­lighted and opposed in full public view. According to his then colleagues in the department, Kejriwal was activist first and bu­reaucrat only marginally.

His activities did not go unnoticed and he was forced to take a sabbatical from work in January 2000. This was a prequel to his quitting the service altogether and some five years later, Kejriwal and Sisodia launched Kabir, another organisation dedicated to “fighting corruption”, demanding a Jan Lokpal, and using RTI to amplify people’s participation in governance. Along the way, in 2006 Kejriwal picked up the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emer­gent Leadership, which he used to raise his political market value. Unlike Parivartan though, Kabir took institutional donations to run but was also abandoned as a project later. Parivartan itself had become practically defunct by 2012 and Kejriwal himself later acknowledged that it only had a limited and transient impact.

His ‘mentor’ Anna Hazare, with his India Against Corrup­tion (IAC) campaign, turned out to be the right opportunity at the perfect time, lending a suitably malleable forum and a pet platform for all cause hunters, including the likes of psepholo­gist Yogendra Yadav. The high-decibel ‘andolan’ included, in its initial phase, those with diverse interests and worldviews like Kiran Bedi, Baba Ramdev, Kumar Vishwas, Santosh Hegde, and others. Hazare later asserted that AAP was formed in Novem­ber 2012 by Kejriwal against his better judgement and despite Hazare’s advice that his shagird (protégé) stick to strengthening a non-political movement.

Most other big names associated with IAC soon dissociated themselves from the campaign and specifically AAP, which went on to contest the 2013 Delhi Assembly election and did hand­somely, only for President’s Rule to be imposed after Kejriwal’s government fell when it failed to push through the Lokpal Bill in the House. He came back with a bang a year later, in his sec­ond term as Delhi chief minister, his muffler and red sweater, his scratchy winter cough, his well-publicised trips to the Hanuman Mandir and right-hand man Sisodia by his side—and the bur­nished victim complex firmly in place. It worked at the hustings.

But Kejriwal has turned out very different in the years since, with many of his falsehoods publicly busted, including his stand against dynastic politics. Sunita Kejriwal, considered for the chief ministerial post while her husband was in jail, also remains on the A-list of campaigners in this election, outranking other senior AAP leaders. He was also called out for misleading people with his avowed distancing from Congress after he joined the I.N.D.I.A. bloc for last year’s Lok Sabha polls. It remains to be seen if, with multiple allegations of scams, a jail term (for both Kejriwal and his top ministers) and a drop in public goodwill, Kejriwal’s victim card will pay dividends any longer with Delhi’s fatigued voters.

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