'Kejri' between the 'fundas'

ARVIND KEJRIWAL AND THE AAM AADMI PARTY
An Inside Look
Pran Kurup
Bloomsbury
133 pages, Rs 399

It cannot be easy to objectively analyse a friend from college who is now a contender to India’s prime ministerial chair, particularly when you have basked in some of his reflected glory. To his credit, Pran Kurup does try, even if episodically, to dispassionately assess his friend “Kejri”, his batch-mate from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Messrs Kurup and Kejriwal spent their four undergrad years in the same hostel in the mid- to late-1980s. The two kept in touch intermittently later when Mr Kejriwal took leave from the Indian Revenue Service to devote himself to social work in the Delh slums. Later, Mr Kurup was part of the team that provided technological backup to the Jan Lokpal movement and then to the Aam Aadmi Party’s membership drive and election preparedness.

Mr Kurup, therefore, has been part of AAP’s inner circle, although peripatetically, which makes his assessments of important events in AAP’s journey of huge interest. It is also a blessing that he has spent nearly three decades in the United States, and is more versed with the world of technological entrepreneurship than the dynamics of the Indian political system, its caste and religious fault lines. This world view lends simplicity to his analysis of the phenomena of Mr Kejriwal and AAP as the most successful political start-ups of recent decades. It is probably this simplicity of vision that has also been Mr Kejriwal’s forte as a communicator of AAP’s spectacular rise in national politics.

Mr Kurup says the strength of AAP, and its predecessor India Against Corruption, has been their open source platforms, which made crowd sourcing of ideas a leitmotif. But AAP has also increasingly been criticised as a coterie of half-a-dozen men around Mr Kejriwal that does the decision-making. Mr Kurup, however, says “coterie isn’t a bad word” in the AAP context. The author draws a parallel between his and Mr Kejriwal’s IIT days to explain the bitter parting of ways with AAP founders Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav.

At IIT, Mr Kejriwal neither belonged to the “poorna funda faction”, the highly intelligent/hardworking students, nor the “gol funda faction”, those who were nonchalant about their academic performance, but somewhere in between — as did most students. The genesis of the split in AAP, Mr Kurup says, wasn’t at all ideological but a power struggle between its minority “poorna funda” group led by Messrs Yadav and Bhushan versus its “action wing”, or the doers, that recognised Mr Kejriwal as their leader.

Mr Bhushan, the author writes, had a “wavelength differential” with the rest of the team and Mr Yadav, with his “natural propensity for poorna funda”, failed to fit into the AAP’s “culture core”. Both led a group of left-leaning intellectuals and activists who looked down upon the rest and thought of themselves as intellectually superior, Mr Kurup says. The author blames Messrs Bhushan, Yadav and the group they led for their unwillingness to shoulder responsibilities like fund collection and selection of candidates but their swiftness to criticise when something went wrong. He says, ideally, Messrs Bhushan and Kejriwal should have spent a couple of hours in a room and sorted out the differences. But in the end, Mr Kejriwal chose the “action wing” over “poorna funda” faction. Elsewhere,

Mr Kurup also says this divorce can help Mr Kejriwal get rid of AAP’s anti-business stigma.

The author rejects insinuations that sycophancy is key to an entry to Mr Kejriwal’s coterie, and claims the AAP chief plays by instinct in trusting a person and not because they have praised him. He says the AAP coterie constitutes people who have given up their jobs and have 24x7 commitment to the party. “The much maligned coterie, despite its shortcomings, is what makes the AAP work,” Mr Kurup writes.

His assessment that media has been unfair to Mr Kejriwal and AAP, primarily at the behest of the Centre, betrays a persecution complex. Incidentally, the AAP government in Delhi has a budget for publicity that is estimated at over Rs 500 crore. Mr Kurup would also do well to brush up on his history when he says the media played an important role during the Independence movement and the Emergency, but was failing in its duty when it comes to AAP. The chapter on AAP government's decision on reducing water and power tariff is thought-provoking as it points to the huge hidden subsidies that go to places like the Delhi Golf Club, the haunt of Delhi's rich and mighty.

Mr Kurup has interesting insights into “Kejri’s” personality and anecdotes from their college days. We are told more than once that Mr Kejriwal is a teetotaller, and that he didn’t use curse words either at IIT, when the use of creative curse words was admired and encouraged, or now. The author says many who have known Mr Kejriwal are perplexed at him invoking god in his inaugural speech after being sworn in as Delhi chief minister because he was known to be an atheist. Mr Kurup concludes that Mr Kejriwal is conducting himself not out of personal ambition or drive, but is driven by forces beyond himself!

Interestingly, Mr Kurup says, the only election that Mr Kejriwal had ever contested, before he defeated incumbent Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit in the 2013 Assembly polls, was that of his hostel’s mess secretary. Their seniors at IIT, Mr Kurup says, would make their group enact the “Mehbooba” song from Hindi hit Sholay; Mr Kejriwal played the villain Gabbar Singh and Mr Kurup copied Helen’s dance moves. The chapter on how his friends ribbed Mr Kejriwal when he met them in Goa after AAP’s disastrous Lok Sabha campaign is hilarious. They ribbed him for his bare torso dip in the Ganga in Varanasi as his “Mandakini moment” and assured him that Delhi’s housewives would vote for him in the next elections since he was so “smoking hot”.

As for the road ahead, Mr Kurup says AAP will need to discuss internally questions like where it sees itself in the next five, 10 or 20 years. It should also try to be a “broad tent” and open its doors to more women, minorities and Dalits. It seems, if not Mr Kejriwal, at least one of his closest friends does believe that the AAP could replace Congress as the umbrella party of India.