(Ashutosh joined the Aam Aadmi Party in January. The former journalist took on former Union minister Kapil Sibal and Health Minister Harsh Vardhan in the national election from Chandni Chowk in Delhi.)
It's extremely painful to hear a senior leader of the Aam Admi Party, Shri Shanti Bhushan ji, talking about a lack of organizational skill and political maturity in Arvind Kejriwal. He has opened his heart out to two national news channels.
This has created a huge controversy and the media has painted it as another serious divide in the party; according to them, the party is going to implode. A few of our old friends have again come together to deplore Kejriwal and his leadership. Benevolent channels have once again provided an opportunity to some disgruntled people to appear on TV and spew venom.
It is for neither the first nor last time that a leader of a political party had been criticized outside the forum of the party. Those who are in leadership roles should take such incidents in their stride and accept it as a professional hazard. In a democracy, no leader, however mighty he or she might be, can attain a position where there is no criticism . It is only in dictatorship or totalitarian regimes that the leadership is above reproach. But India is neither a fascist state nor has it yet slipped into a dictatorship, so leaders will be criticized and there will always be differences of opinion.
It is the difference of opinion in a party which defines the dynamism of the party and its vibrancy. But if difference of opinion becomes a public spectacle, then there is a problem, because the maturity of a party's internal democracy is also defined by its conflict resolution mechanism- how the best minds sit down and resolve their differences. It would have been better if Shanti Bhushan ji had raised these issues in the party forum, as that was the right forum to discuss party matters and that would not have become an embarrassment for the party.
I humbly beg to differ with Shanti Bhushan ji. I fail to understand how Arvind can be faulted on his organizational competence. I have known Arvind for three years. I remember formally meeting him on 3rd April 2011 when he was to launch the anti- corruption movement (which later became famous as the Anna movement) at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. This agitation was an instant hit and unknown people like Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia became new social icons overnight. Later, the 13-day fast-unto-death by Anna took the entire movement to a new height. Parliament had to specially extend its session and it unanimously appealed to Anna to break his fast. The country had not seen a non-political movement of this magnitude earlier.
This movement has changed the national discourse of the country. Those who insisted that corruption could never be a national issue were also forced to admit to the success of the movement. I had not yet joined the party. I had a written a book on the movement - Anna , 13 Days that Awakened India- and had said that Anna was the face of the movement but Arvind was the architect of the movement. It was he who coined an idea, got everybody together, created a volunteer force and shook the very foundations of the establishment. It was hailed the world over and dubbed a unique experiment in Indian democracy.
But once the futility of the movement was apparent, Arvind and a few of his supporters including Shanti Bhushan, his son Prashant Bhushan, and others decided to form a political party. Anna decided to be politically neutral. Yet again, it was Arvind who led from the front. He took the most powerful people of the system head on, galvanized the whole party, and took to the streets to protest against the prices of electricity and water. Despite being a diabetic, he went on a hunger strike for 15 days. Doctors had advised him that it would be fatal for him as a diabetic can't survive without food for more than 48 hours. But he did the impossible.
Aam Aadmi Party, a non-entity, suddenly became a household name in Delhi and outside, and in the assembly elections, the party won 28 seats. No other party in Indian history had done so spectacularly in such a short span of time. Arvind went on to form the government. AAP under his leadership had changed the rules of the game. Indian elections till then were defined by money and muscle-power but Arvind and his team showed the world that elections could be fought without them; that long-established heavyweights from the BJP and the Congress could be defeated by novices. Indian and global media went gaga over AAP's success and Arvind became a global figure. In this context at least I am not willing to buy the argument that Arvind lacks organizational skills and political maturity.
In independent India, Arvind is probably the only activist/politician who dared to be different and challenged the establishment without any material resources. He created an idea. He dared to think 'the unthinkable'- that corruption can be eradicated. A committed volunteer force and idealism were his only assets. Now I have joined the party and for the last two months, I have been helping him in building an organization in Delhi at the booth-level and can tell you with my limited experience that he has phenomenal organisational capacity and also the capacity to think out-of-the-box.
Let's not forget the fact that he's human and commits mistakes, but he has the heart to accept his mistakes in public. He openly admitted that he should not have resigned as Chief Minister of Delhi. I remember at that time, many senior leaders had embraced him and told him, "Arvind Bhai, you have written a new chapter in the history of Indian politics by resigning."
Yes I agree he has very strong views on issues but which big leader does not have those? Leaders like him are great because they don't tread the beaten path and are not guided by conventional wisdom. The problem is when we try to judge them by our limited conventional intelligence.
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