Newsmaker: How Arvind Kejriwal uses 'Dharna' to avoid political suffocation

While the Delhi CM has deftly garnered Opposition support against the Modi govt, how he mends fences with a disgruntled Congress remains to be seen

Murky isn’t just Delhi’s current weather, but also its political landscape. If the city state’s residents are gasping for breath under a thick haze of dust, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has lately indulged in rare political contortions to prevent his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) from being suffocated between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Since Monday, Kejriwal and three of his ministers have been sitting on a dharna in the waiting room of Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal’s office at Delhi’s Raj Bhavan. The immediate provocation is the refusal of Indian Administrative Service officers to attend meetings convened by AAP ministers for the past three months.

At stake in ten months are seven Lok Sabha seats of Delhi, and connected to that outcome is whether the AAP survives in Indian politics beyond the expiry of the current term of the Delhi Assembly in February 2020.

After the high of its emphatic win in the Delhi Assembly polls in February 2015, the AAP’s failures in the Punjab and Goa Assembly polls have punctured its ambitions of providing an effective third alternative to the BJP and Congress in states with entrenched bi-polar politics.

The AAP is now a party restricted to Delhi. To Kejriwal’s advantage, neither the BJP nor Congress has leaders in Delhi who can match either his connect with the people or his credibility to launch street protests. The AAP’s governance model in Delhi has also come for praise, particularly its work in improving government schools and providing affordable health facilities in government hospitals.

But several of AAP’s initiatives have been blocked by the office of the Lieutenant Governor. The running feud with Delhi’s bureaucracy, after Delhi chief secretary Anshu Prakash accused the AAP leadership of manhandling him, hasn’t helped. AAP leadership alleges the senior bureaucracy has turned non-cooperative at the behest of the Centre.

With Lok Sabha elections round the corner, the AAP government is desperate either to be seen to be delivering on governance or convince people how the Modi government has continuously, via Baijal’s office, put up obstacles to the implementation of pro-people policies. 

In this tug-of-war with the Modi government, Kejriwal has sought and received, support from opposition parties. The AAP has also been keen to explore an alliance with the Congress in Delhi. It believes AAP and Congress should contest four and three seats respectively in Delhi to ensure the pooling of anti-BJP votes.

But the Delhi unit of the Congress is against such an alliance. The problems of the Congress government in Puducherry, which is also a Union Territory with a Legislative Assembly, have been somewhat similar in dealing with Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi.  But many in the central leadership of the Congress blame the Kejriwal-led "India against corruption" movement for the downfall of the United Progressive Alliance government, and those wounds are still fresh.

Last month, Janata Dal (Secular) leader H D Kumaraswamy invited Kejriwal to his oath-taking ceremony in Bengaluru. While Kejriwal sat on the dais along with opposition leaders, he wasn’t part of the photo-op where the leaders lined up to display opposition solidarity. The Congress leadership had expressly conveyed to the JD(S) that its leaders Sonia and Rahul Gandhi would not like to be photographed in the same frame as Kejriwal.

On Wednesday, Rahul invited opposition leaders to an iftar party. Congress leaders pointedly told journalists that nearly all opposition parties and their leaders were invited, but for Kejriwal and AAP.

With both the BJP and Congress state units keen to rid Delhi of its "third force," Kejriwal has decided to take recourse to his tried and tested strategy of politics of agitation. He has been sitting on a dharna since Monday to demand the LG approve his government’s initiative to have home delivery of rations.

“Every right-thinking person is asking the same question – why is the Centre instigating the strike by the IAS? How can the Centre not allow doorstep delivery of rations? These are simple and non-controversial demands of the people of Delhi,” he tweeted from the waiting room of the LG’s official residence on Thursday.

Yet again, Kejriwal has shown his penchant for picking up an issue that will resonate with Delhi’s poorest. Doorstep delivery would not only help plug leakages but also save the poor the hassle of queuing up at ration shops. On Thursday, Kejriwal also wrote to the PM seeking his intervention to break the impasse with IAS officers.

In his letter to Modi, Kejriwal said important civic works, including cleaning the drains before the monsoon, setting up mohalla clinics and measures to curb pollution in Delhi were stuck because of the alleged strike by the IAS officers.

"Pollution is the biggest problem in Delhi. Earlier, there was a review and planning meeting every 15 days on the issue, but due to the strike (by the IAS officers), there has been no such meeting in the last three months," Kejriwal said.

Kejriwal has said they will not leave Baijal’s office until their demands are met. The AAP has threatened to stage a dharna at the Prime Minister's Office on Sunday if a solution to the issue was not found this week.

Delhi is set to witness interesting times, probably a repeat of the events of the 49-day Kejriwal government in 2013. With a little more than a year to go for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the target of Kejriwal’s ire then was the Congress-led UPA government. With less than 10-months to go for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, this time it would be the Modi government. But with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadre firmly behind the Modi government, Kejriwal this time would need all the support he can get from other opposition parties, particularly the Congress, to make it count.