Though I am a Congress Member of Parliament, it gives me no pleasure - no, not even a smidgen of what the Germans dub schadenfreude, the satisfaction one gains from others' misfortunes - to witness the implosion of the Aam Aadmi Party. Like many Indians of an educated middle-class background, I could and did empathize with the anger and frustration that had impelled AAP's early days, and the idealism and volunteer passion that had sustained it. I had my doubts about the narrow-minded fanaticism of some of the party's top leadership and its collective self-righteousness, but I could not quarrel with the desire for an India cleansed of corruption and double-dealing, an India that AAP promised to bring about if only given the chance.
The first time AAP was given a chance, it was with the support and backing of my Congress Party, but after a few weeks of spectacular misgovernance - including a Law Minister harassing black women in their homes, and a Chief Minister sleeping in the streets while conducting a dharna against the Central government - we in the Congress concluded AAP was not fit to govern.
The voters of Delhi disagreed with us earlier this year, flocking behind AAP and giving it a record majority. Many traditional Congress voters, anxious to avoid what seemed the inevitable rise of the hubristic BJP to power, deserted us to vote for the stronger non-BJP alternative. AAP formed a government on its own.
It has only been four months, but the experiment is in tatters. This time Mr Kejriwal isn't agitating in the streets, let alone sleeping on them, but AAP seems to have found new ways to disappoint its supporters. The party has all but split after a spectacular round of blood-letting that saw it expelling two of its most prominent and nationally-respected members, as well as its internal LokPal. (What could be a more devastating indictment of AAP's straying from its own ideals than the defenestration of a LokPal, the very institution for which the Anna Hazare movement was created?) The Delhi government of Chief Minister Kejriwal has been engaged in an unseemly and torturous tussle with the Lieutenant Governor, Najeeb Jung, over bureaucratic appointments. It has also declared war on the very media that fuelled its rise to power, threatening legal action and barring or restricting media access to the work of the Delhi government. And the issue that won Kejriwal the most middle-class support - the lowering of power tariffs - has been abandoned, with a 6 per cent increase in power tariffs being announced this week.
What does this sorry four-month record suggest? Most damningly, a worrying lack of political maturity, best exemplified in the contretemps over the temporary appointment of a senior Indian Administrative Service officer, Shakuntala Gamlin, as acting Chief Secretary of Delhi for a mere ten days. A huge fuss was made by Chief Minister Kejriwal, whose reckless character assassination of the lady in question was not borne out by anything in her official record and reputation. Worse, the official reason adduced by the AAP government for objecting to her appointment - that she had issued a "comfort letter" to the power companies, thereby revealing her bias in their favour - betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and significance of such letters, which have been issued by many other officials in the past without any such criticism. But it transpired that Ms Gamlin had previously objected to unelected Aam Aadmi Party members, not in the Cabinet, attending confidential closed-door meetings of the Delhi government, and it was this that had incurred the Chief Minister's displeasure.
The fact is that officials must uphold the rules, and mature politicians must respect them for doing so. Governance involves a partnership between elected politicians - who must necessarily devote a large proportion of their time to attending to their electorate, and therefore will not always be focused on their administrative tasks - and bureaucrats, who execute the policies decided upon by the politicians. It is a long-standing truism that no political executive can truly succeed without the cooperation and trust of the civil service. Mr Kejriwal has forfeited this by his disgraceful conduct on the Gamlin affair. He will find it that much harder to get anything done as chief executive of Delhi.
If that weren't bad enough, he has made matters worse by his running feud with the Lieutenant Governor, who enjoys some administrative powers that other Governors don't, since under our Constitution, Delhi is not a full-fledged state. The details of the two duelling men's back-and-forth over appointments have played out in the media like a bureaucratic soap opera, culminating in the embarrassment and absurdity of two IAS officers claiming simultaneously to be the state's Home Secretary. The situation is as farcical as the earlier episode of Mr Kejriwal's Chief Ministerial dharna. Both suggest he does not know how to use the power he sought for the benefit of those he governs.
In addition, his carefully projected image of probity and incorruptibility has been coming part at the seams. First came the expulsions of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan, two of the party's most prominent, eloquent and untarnished faces, along with professors Anand Kumar and Ajit Jha, lesser known but highly respected intellectuals. The unseating of the LokPal, military hero Admiral Ramdas, raised fundamental questions about the party leadership's integrity. And the icing on the cake was the revelation that the Law Minister, Kejriwal loyalist Jitender Singh Tomar, had faked his degrees. (I am not entering into the fresh controversy surrounding his predecessor, Mr Bharti, because it is unpleasant to drag domestic, especially marital, disputes into the public arena.)
Then The Hindu reported on June 12 that at least nine AAP MLAs have criminal charges pending against them, ranging from slapping a government official to stocking illicit liquor. How, one may ask Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, is the AAP any different from the parties it vowed to displace?
At one time there was even talk of AAP moving beyond Delhi and representing at the least a new option for urban middle-class voters across the country. Today it can barely cling on in the place where it enjoys an unprecedented majority. I seriously doubt whether Mr Kejriwal is (and I don't mean the word in a legal sense) constitutionally capable of holding on to office for his full five-year term.
Arvind Kejriwal first came to public notice as a master of the politics of protest - the rallies, marches, agitations and
dharnas at which he excelled were complemented by attention-grabbing accusations against a variety of targets levelled at televised press conferences. But governance doesn't work that way. It requires different skills and talents - patience, compromise, attention to detail, an ability to look at the bigger picture, and staying power - that do not appear to be among Mr Kejriwal's strengths. Civil society activism is no guarantee of the talents required to run an administration. The Aam Aadmi Party experience raises serious doubts about whether a party of protest can ever turn itself convincingly into a party of governance.
(Dr Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 15 books, including, most recently, India Shastra: Reflections On the Nation in Our Time.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.