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As politicians get busy prepping for the impending elections, India's media and Twitterati are preoccupied with another exercise entirely - feverishly unearthing videos, interviews and pretty much any available material that could remotely be of use to call Arvind Kejriwal's bluff. Every exploit - past and present - of the Aam Aadmi Party chief is at this time being scanned under a microscopic lens, with a media contingent on the prowl, waiting for him to falter.
Late last week, Kejriwal's seemingly innocuous decision to take a private charter jet from Jaipur to Delhi to attend the India Today Conclave became the focal point of an hour long TV debate. Kejriwal's adversaries accused him of being a fraud, while some of his own party members openly admonished the act saying it went against the very grain of the Aam Aadmi philosophy that Kejriwal peddles. The rabid, unforgiving TV anchor on that debate countered Kejriwal's contention that the media house organizing the event had paid for the charter, by pointing out that he shouldn't be accepting such privileges from the very media he accuses of being 'paid'. Good point!
At that very event, TV Today's Editor-at-Large Rahul Kanwal went on a charge against a stunned Kejriwal for his double standards in not instituting an enquiry against Delhi's former law minister Somnath Bharti (for his alleged role in a porn spamming website scam), while asking for a commission to be instated for every allegation against Congress and BJP leaders. For perhaps the first time in many months, Kejriwal was rendered defenseless.
Then, just as the week began, a video showing the AAP leader asking a Hindi TV anchor to emphasize on certain sections of his interview went viral on YouTube as a so-called exposé, presumably of the close nexus between AAP and certain news stations. It even became a topic of stiff debate on Zee News, whose editors ironically went to jail and are contesting charges of extortion from a corporate house.
In the past as well, the former Delhi Chief Minister has been caught on the wrong foot on several occasions. After making a brouhaha for instance, about the VIP culture in Delhi and rejecting the house allotted to him, reports had later revealed that Kejriwal, contrary to his public stance, had actually asked for two spacious bungalows.
Many of these are crimes (if, at all they qualify as that) or transgressions of a far less severe magnitude than those that some of his political opponents have been accused of on a regular basis. But while his adversaries can get away with impunity and a far lesser degree of public scrutiny, for Kejriwal, the standards for veracity have been set much higher.
His own sanctimony and self-righteousness are to blame for this, for they automatically disallow Kejriwal to indulge in certain practices that could well be considered standard norms for his colleagues in other parties. An Akhilesh Yadav or Sachin Pilot for instance flying into a city to attend a media conclave in a chartered private jet would be humdrum, as would a Praful Patel, seeking a spacious 5 bedroom bungalow in Lutyen's Delhi. Kejriwal indulging in such behavior though will be considered sacrilege!
It is clear, AAP's high moral ground and symbolic flirtation with idealism, rather than helping its brand, is impeding its appeal due to repeated faux pas and instances of the party's leader not being able to live up to his own exacting standards. The consequences of this are greater than we can imagine. Infuriating as Kejriwal's double standards might seem, concentrating our full energies on sensationalizing his every gaffe, however harmless it may be in the larger, dirtier political context, deflects attention from the immense contribution he continues to make to changing the political discourse in 2014.
So at a time when headlines scream that India will challenge the US's record on election spending (Rs 300 billion), with 70% of the funding to mainstream parties coming from undisclosed sources, news of Kejriwal holding a fundraiser dinner to raise campaign money is largely relegated to tailpieces. Even the tenor of questioning on television debates has become largely antagonistic towards AAP. Kejriwal was reproached for the manner in which he questioned Modi for example, but our pro-establishment instincts didn't let us dwell over whether some of those questions were compelling. Similarly attempts by AAP to bring to light instances of crony capitalism are often met with rebuttals about how the party is anti-business and anarchic, rather than anti-graft.
The binaries created around Kejriwal and his party are to a large extent his own doing. His holier-than-thou, arrogant, 'us vs them' approach has ticked people off. But let's be clear that Kejriwal is not that man in a glass house pelting stones at others. He is an honest crusader, perhaps a bit conceited, but genuine (at least in relative terms), nonetheless. Let's not destroy him in our bid to cut him down to size. He may be tripping occasionally, but that's only because he has set the bar high.
