Kejriwal Ad, The Aam Aurat, and the Strong Reactions

The reaction to Arvind Kejriwal's television commercial-anger, disillusionment, mockery-is caused by overlapping but distinct provocations. It's useful to separate them to understand the vehemence of this reaction.

For those who haven't seen it, the commercial consists of a middle class housewife going about her chores, thinking about the ways in which Kejriwal's leadership has eased her household anxieties by reducing utility bills and ending petty corruption. In passing she waits on her couch-potato husband and rages against Kejriwal's critics especially the television talk shows that defame him.

Using government money to film and buy television time for party propaganda is the most glaring of these provocations. Newspaper reports suggested that a week's run on television could cost as much as Rs 1.5 crore. Coming in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that disallowed photographs of politicians in government advertisements, the commercial seemed a deliberate attempt to flout the spirit of that judgment: it didn't actually 'picture' Kejriwal, but it made up for that by referring to him nearly a dozen times.

The Aam Aadmi Party / Delhi Government / Arvind Kejriwal might argue that publicising the good work done by a government is a legitimate use of public money and that the references to Kejriwal are reasonable given that he's the Chief  Minister. This is a bad argument on two counts. One, the Supreme Court clearly intended to discourage the personalisation of governance. Two, a populist government that daily argues that it is financially constrained shouldn't be wasting such money as it has on political puffery.

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It'll be interesting to see if the Court decides to censure the government. In politics, as in much else, ethical standing depends on the ability to make sharp practice seem business as usual. If the Court looks the other way, Kejriwal and Sons (aka the AAP) will claim vindication for their stand that the commercial was no more than a DAVP advertisement in full motion.

While the outrage about taxpayer money being spent on boosting Kejriwal is justified, the related idea that the pictured housewife's Arvind worship is a political betrayal, is not. The argument that the AAP, having claimed to be different, is now revealed to be no more than a cult of personality, is unpersuasive. Arvind Kejriwal has always been the karta of both the Aam Aadmi Party and the movement out which it was born, India Against Corruption. Its strategic choices, its victories and defeats, its electoral standing and its political potential have always turned on his persona. Those who claim that the commercial has been an unpleasant revelation are either being strategically disingenuous or just haven't been paying attention.

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The commercial is consistent with the AAP's political manifesto and its target constituency, Delhi's lower middle class, particularly its womenfolk. The AAP's ability to mobilise voters is based on its populist promise that it will improve their lives by bringing corrupt bureaucracies and corporations to heel; it isn't founded on a commitment to inner-party democracy or collective leadership. The reason these promises are believed is because Kejriwal's crusading, confrontational style, his maverick righteousness, his Everyman persona have made him a charismatic figure. The commercial harnesses that charisma and tries to set it to work. Why is that shocking?

The right-thinking critique of the commercial is a response to both its social content and its aesthetic values.

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The commercial's social messaging has been widely condemned as regressive because it shows a woman doing all the household chores and waiting upon her husband while this stolid fellow does nothing apart from sit and watch television. AAP's gender credentials were already suspect given its all-male leadership and Lipika Mitra's allegations that her husband Somnath Bharti (earlier notorious for his midnight raid on Nigerian women in Khirki village) had physically abused her through their marriage. It must have been tempting to see the commercial's narrative as a poisonous plant growing organically out of the rich Ghaziabadi loam of the AAP's male chauvinism.

There is, however, an alternative reading possible. The housewife is this story's protagonist, its voice. She is not insurgent-she manages the household within the limitations of patriarchal authority-but she's politically engaged and impatient with her couch potato husband's willingness to be led by the nose by talk shows disparaging the Chief Minister.  He is a great lump with no speaking part, and if I were him, I'd be worried; going by the way his wife's eyes mist over, she fancies Kejriwal.

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Is the AAP out of line when it argues that the household pictured in the commercial reflects 'social reality'? No. Not if the demographic it is aimed at receives it as a plausible scenario. The census tells us that just 10.6 percent of Delhi's women participate in the workforce. But isn't type-casting the housewife status quoist? Yes, but this is a political commercial, not an insurgent pamphlet. Shouldn't we expect better from a party that once supported the reading down of Section 377? Yes. It would have been fun if she had made the lauki she was peeling radioactive with mirch before feeding it to him, just to see him hiccup, but again, this is political propaganda, not a progressive skit. The suggestion that depicting the patriarchal household today presages the justification of worse things tomorrow-wife-beating, majoritarianism, global warming-is an extrapolation that might want to wait on events.

I suspect that one reason this commercial has got such a bad press is that its production values and style are straight out of Doordarshan's public service messages. There's a cardboard tackiness to it, a shameless obviousness that offends the commentariat's metropolitan sensibilities. My first reaction was annoyance: shouldn't a political commercial that has designs on me be better mounted and more obliquely made? It has since occurred to me that its success or failure mightn't turn on my reaction. Whether type-casting the aam aurat the way this commercial does is politically effective or not isn't going to be decided by you, me or the anglophone communion: it is a lowering but unavoidable fact that the Aam Aadmi Party has bigger fish to fry.

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Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in Delhi. His most recent book is 'Homeless on Google Earth' (Permanent Black, 2013).

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.