The chaos on the streets of Delhi is over and the AAP has been admonished enough for its misadventure. It is time to find the takeaways from the vociferous media debate that followed the party's 'rash', 'thoughtless' and 'anarchic' action.
We love the system: Here's a very late discovery by the chattering classes: Delhi police are saints, they won't say it in as many words though. They seem to have bought the police's position in the Somnath Bharti case that they never make arrests without warrants, they never harass slum-dwellers and innocent Muslims, they never submit themselves to political influence and they never stray from laid procedures. If at all they are wrong, they must be dealt with the terms of engagement the 'system' provides.
Security personnel caning a AAP member in New Delhi. PTI
The procedures might be ineffectual and beneficial for the corrupt and the criminal—which it has been—but that is how it is. Former chief minister Sheila Dikshit had been demanding greater control over the police for 15 years, but she failed. She stuck to the rule book. Arvind Kejriwal decided to go beyond it and have paid the price. Obviously, he hurt the collective self-interest that provides legitimacy to a rotten system.
The 'system'—that invisible, all-pervasive entity—has to be protected as must be the entire gamut of rules and procedures that constitute it. Once in office, a chief minister or a minister becomes part of the system. They have to stick to the rules of decorum. They no longer can protest too much nor can they upset about procedures even when they work to the detriment of the ordinary masses and are designed to excluding the powerless and the disprivileged. In short, a man in office is expected to become a different beast altogether.
It's about class, silly: Have you noticed the crowd at Kejriwal's dharna? It had too many slum-wallahs, people who looked they did not belong to the upper crust, women in slippers and crumpled sarees - just too ordinary for the media talking heads to be comfortable with. How could this bunch be allowed to have its way? Of course, they are harassed by the police, criminals make their lives miserable and they have no recourse to justice. All their complaints about their state of existence are justified, but how dare they change things on their own? If it's the suspension of police officials today, it could be anything tomorrow.
Doesn't that mean rearrangement of power equations within the society? Doesn't that make the middle class irrelevant? What was missing in the dharna was the middle class, the media favourites. It was angry but it had no way of attacking the core, substantive principle behind the protest. Thus it had to be about governance, the lack of sense responsibility in a chief minister and what not. Kejriwal may have crossed the limit this time, and his minister many times over, but let's not forget they were giving voice to the underclass. Expect the conflict of classes to get sharper over time.
AAP is a threat, for everyone: Recollect the shrill noise the political parties have been making about the dharna. The pussycat has started roaring and it has started growing stripes too. Nobody knows how big, but there's discomfort in several circles over the development. Not long ago, the BJP was happy that the new outfit was cutting into Congress votes and causing it immense damage. Now it is wary. The AAP plans to go national and it threatens to hijack its youth and urban votes, cultivated assiduously by Narendra Modi.
The Congress knows the AAP poses an existential threat to it. Its traditional voters across the country could now switch to the new outfit and leave it in a more sorry state than it already is. It has given the party a long rope to hang itself in Delhi, but the AAP is proving too smart. It has upset all calculations on both sides. It is a legitimate threat now and has to be handled thus.
The AAP has been in power for barely three weeks. Nobody, not even the media, is prepared to give it time to settle down. Everyone has been living with anarchy—albeit a silent, corrosive one—for long, but all perceive a non-violent dharna on the streets of Delhi a great threat. Something has to be wrong somewhere.
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