 "Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal addresses a seminar on completion of four years of Right to Service Act in Bihar, at Adhiveshan Bhawan in Patna on Thursday, 27 August 2015 <b>Picture by PTI</b>")
After day-long raids by the Central Bureau of Investigation at the Delhi Secretariat, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal looked directly into the television cameras, struck an aggressive pose, pointed his index finger and sent out a warning to the Prime Minister: “Modiji, others might get scared of your strong arm tactics – CBI raids etc. I’m not intimidated. You don’t know as yet what I am made of. I will fight for the country till my last breath.”
Earlier in the day, he had taken to Twitter to label PM Modi a “coward and a psychopath”, later refusing to retract his invective.
The histrionics on display did enough to project a CBI raid as a direct confrontation between Modi and Kejriwal. The Chief Minister had successfully upped the stakes and grabbed the national headlines.
He then went a step further and levelled a direct accusation against one of the most important ministers in the Modi Cabinet: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, a charge that was bound to make the government squirm.
Kejriwal alleged the CBI raids were aimed at getting hold of an inquiry committee file relating to the functioning of the Delhi District Cricket Association (DDCA), of which Jaitley is a past president. “Yeh file hai DDCA ka file jiske andar Arun Jaitley phas rahe hain (This file pertains to the DDCA probe in which Arun Jaitley is getting trapped),” Kejriwal said.
The rumblings about the DDCA scam were old; even BJP MP Kirti Azad had raised it on several occasions but nobody until now had directly accused Jaitley. The spotlight was now squarely and firmly on the FM and the alleged corruption at the DDCA.
The CBI and the government went blue in the face defending their position that the raids were targeted at Principal Secretary Rajendra Kumar and not the CM, but by then, Kejriwal had taken the higher moral ground, and few seemed to be buying the central government’s argument.
The Chief Minister’s ‘live tweeting’ of the raids on his third floor office at Players Building – where the Delhi Secretariat is housed – and his allegations of “political vendetta” caught public attention. It had even rallied parts of the Opposition, with the Congress, Trinamool Congress and JD(U) raising the issue in Parliament the same morning. The Congress, which otherwise is an adversary of AAP in the capital, was left with little choice but to join cause with the Delhi government in its attack on the Centre accusing it of political vendetta, since it, too, had been accusing the Centre of the same in Congress-ruled states and in the National Herald case involving Sonia and Rahul Gandhi.
However, some like estranged AAP founder-member Prashant Bhushan have rubbished Kejriwal’s claims of political vendetta and instead questioned why the CM was going all out to defend his Principal Secretary. Bhushan has pointed to several complaints that existed against Kumar that were known to the CM even before Kumar’s appointment.
“After all, if there is a substantial case against a person who may happen to be Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister, then he needs to be investigated," Bhushan said, adding that “Merely because he is raided and he happens to be trusted man of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal does not make the raid a political vendetta.”
By punching above his weight and training his guns on Jaitley, Kejriwal has somewhat diverted the attention from the corruption allegations against his trusted bureaucrat. Or as he put it more pithily: “Rajender Kumar bahana hai, Kejriwal nishana hai (Rajendra Kumar is an excuse, the real target is Kejriwal).”
Political observers say the issue can become a springboard for the AAP as it prepares for the Punjab Assembly polls due in 2017, and on which Kejriwal had recently told AAP workers to focus. With four Lok sabha MPs from the state, Kejriwal believes AAP has a shot at winning the state.
For some time now, there has also been speculation that Kejriwal might make his trusted Deputy Deputy Manish Sisodia as chief minister while he focuses solely on Punjab. Using this instance of “political vendetta” to malign the SAD- BJP regime, the AAP could well project Kejriwal as a powerful adversary to Modi, especially given the BJP’s drubbing in Delhi. As it is, the AAP government has been in confrontational mode with the Centre since taking office, accusing it of usurping state powers.
More importantly, it appears, Kejriwal has learnt a valuable lesson or two from ‘Didi’ Mamata Banerjee, the dogged street fighter and West Bengal chief minister whom he has been looking up to as mentor of late. Raising the decibel and the dramatic pitch, warning political opponents and swearing allegiance to the public and the motherland apparently works wonders with the Indian electorate, as Banerjee has shown. Kejriwal seems to be taking a page out of Didi’s playbook.
