The Performer’s Last Act

iN THE MARKETPLACE of martyrdom, populists are frequent buyers. When reason fails, logic abandons and stock complaints of witch-hunt become less reliable, they deploy emotionalism. They project themselves as the
wronged and turn crimes, real and perceived, into punishments. The law of the land, to the fallen populist, is an instrument of persecution in the hands of his political annihilators. They seek absolution elsewhere, in the higher court of conscience. They hope to be rewarded by martyrdom.

Arvind Kejriwal should have resigned long ago. When the aura of the apolitical politician was replaced by the stigma of cover-up. When the principles of the street fighter were discarded for the preservation of power. When the very ordinariness that defined him in the beginning was overshadowed by the privileges of an establishment politician. When scams hit the AAP apparatus, its high echelon deep in the mire, and the veneer of austere ruler cracked. He waited for victimhood to mature.

Martyrdom, in the playbook of populism, is gift-wrapped desperation—and the tantaliser’s last act. The Kejriwal so far is a story of idealism evolving into a struggle between legacy and pragmatism. It is the familiar story of the movements against power: they end up as enterprises of transactional politics. Kejriwal hopes to retrieve his origin story through martyrdom.

The origin story itself was a narrative blend of borrowed ideals. When the Gandhian fighter for a corruption-free India became the founding father of AAP, his vision statement sought to combine politics of truth with socialist loftiness. In the original AAP painting, India was a great grassroots experiment in social justice, the last alternative. It was rejoinder and redemption in one political packaging.

Its leader, long before Zelensky made the casual authority of T-shirt and sweatpants cool, was ordinariness mythicised, half-sleeves and muffler as trademarks of the Everyman Revolutionary. He summoned up all the holy ghosts of political nirvana, ranging from Gandhi to Marx, to introduce himself to India as the only politician who was not moulded by politics-as-usual: the one with a difference among the pretenders.

AAP was the Third Way, or so it aspired to be. In an India divided between dynasties and provincialists, religious nationalists and convenient secularists, here was an idea untouched by the sins of power. Between the Left and the Right, it was not the flexible centre that AAP wanted to dominate. It was the constituency of middle-class drawing rooms and resentful urban ghettos that it wanted to own. For the class that looked for a Dirty Harry, the vigilante with the authenticity of everydayness fitted the bill. For the shirtless legion taken for granted by the traditional parties, the leader with the magical broom was the deliverer. When AAP won Delhi, the moment captured for India the possibilities of active idealism.

Power did not corrupt AAP immediately. The party, especially its leader, struggled to cope with it. The street fighter in him could not resist the romance of the street. The chief minister as satyagrahi was more beguiling an image to sell than a glorified paper pusher. The newer Delhi never happened. Kejriwal was still fighting, as if the sheer drama of the struggle against power was more rewarding than wielding power with the responsibility of a reformer. If Delhi was a showpiece in the Kejriwal era, it was certainly not for governance and competence. It was the stage on which a self-righteous politician steeped in his own cultivated indispensability played out his inflated grievances. The banalisation of Kejriwal had begun.

And the appeal of AAP as the Alternative did not grow beyond two states. In retrospect, the idea that launched the party was larger than the party in power. Its geographical limits only brought out the limits of Kejriwal as a political force. In the end, he was a two-state wonder. And the revolution that joined the gullies and the middle class in a manifesto for change was fast turning into a project in me-alone leadership and deal-making. As the AAP grandees marched into jail, it marked the unmaking of an idea that once shook Delhi. The Kejriwal cult was unravelling. He made himself untenable.

For AAP, politics has always been the theatre of the tormented in which the Lilliputians of Indraprastha struggled against the great power. The performance was a distraction; the rotten core of the alternative-that-wasn’t could not have gone unexposed for long. Martyrdom is Kejriwal’s last desperate performance staged on the ashes of AAP’s reputation.

AAPArvind KejriwalBJPcorruptionDelhi governmentMartyrdomscam