Saswat Pattanayak
Arvind Kejriwal suddenly discovers in Modi a coward and psychopath, simply because he finally becomes a victim of fascist vendetta now. However, this outrage is a social media melodrama as it was Kejriwal himself who has contributed the most in the resulting chaos that prevail today. Modi/Shah and their BJP goons are professionally committed as communal politicians and xenophobes who have always practiced hate politics to perfection. Indian public had always rejected such right-wing fanatics throughout the country’s democratic history. It is Kejriwal who lent them a humane face through his creation of a hoopla over the corruption bogeyman, only with the sole aim to destabilize what he and his right-wing allies Shanti Bhushan, Kiran Bedi and Kumar Vishwas felt as “dynasty politics”.
Bhushan who funded the creation of AAP was also the same man who was one of the founders of BJP in 1980 – the only aim at that time was to oppose Indira Gandhi because she had dared to “misuse her power” by ensuring that India aims to become a “socialist” and “secular” country. When BJP failed to gain any momentum in India owing to their rabidly communal agendas, these reactionaries floated an outfit by the name of AAP to espouse the same anti-Congress politics, but on a more populist political plank: Corruption.
Prior to advancing the carefully orchestrated political party AAP, Kejriwal was at the forefront of the anti-socialist formation called “India Against Corruption” and an anti-secular formation called “Youth for Equality” – the sole aim of these so-called apolitical movements (ably supported by the likes of objective corporate media comprising Arnav Goswami/Rajat Sharma) was to excite the otherwise indifferent middle class students into getting wet dreams over the potential demise of Congress and the Left in India; to materialize the RSS reveries of a Congress-Mukt Bharat into reality.
Aam Aadmi Party – many of whose stalwarts subsequently have gone back to their BJP family – thereafter emerged as the New Right in India, the first outfit to succeed in legitimizing capitalistic meritocracy as an acceptable political proposition in a society whose collective progress depends on reservation policies, to allow for a political scope for rabidly communal elements of this society to gain a respectable electoral mandate that was virtually impossible to obtain prior to Kejriwal and his team arrived as the educated “we-are-not-political-we-are-you” actors, and to create for the first time in India’s history a Parliament without an empowered Opposition.
It is not Modi, but Kejriwal who created an imagination for a new India whose socio-economic policies could be drafted without the Congress and the Left. And when Kejriwal is not given that rightful due, and instead is treated like he were an outsider, it is only natural that he calls his former bosses names. But even then, Modi continues to heave a sigh of relief, because Kejriwal once again is letting him to be used as a tool to diminish the current debate just when Rahul Gandhi cries vendetta. Because educated Indian bourgeois class and its aspirants know quite well, that when vendetta too appears meritocratic, it is no longer to be treated as a misuse of power.