Is AAP right to cry foul?

Ministry of Home Affairs recently sacked nine advisors to the Delhi government

If Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has a torch song, it might well be that Lesley Gore hit from the 1960s. The one that goes, “It’s my party / and I’ll cry if I want to / cry if I want to... you would cry too if it happened to you.” So adept is AAP at feeling sorry for itself, it scarcely needs journalists to join the (self)pity party. But how do you analyse the decision to sack nine advisors to the Delhi government without conceding the central government’s determination to be as petty, vengeful and obstructive as possible in its dealings with AAP?
 
Pedants will pontificate about the “legality” of the Ministry of Home Affairs’ (MHA) decision to revoke the appointments of these advisors. Is the Centre acting by the book? It claims that it needed to be consulted for prior approval, according to some memorandum from a couple of decades ago. It’s a flimsy justification, particularly when the Centre could have made its objections known when the appointments were made. Raghav Chadha, one of the “AAP Nine”, held his post, he said, “for 45 days in 2016 for a paltry sum of Rs 2.50”. Chadha has since made a point of mailing a demand draft for said paltry sum back to the home minister, Rajnath Singh.
 
While acknowledging the comic effect of Chadha’s gesture, AAP members also expressed misgivings. Since the positions offered were void from the very start, could the government retrospectively demand the repayment of salaries? And while Chadha may have been working for a notional “salary”, others were making as much as Rs 80,000 a month. Congress Delhi chief Ajay Maken was correct to observe the arbitrary nature of the Ministry of Home Affairs’ order. The Shunglu Committee report, he said, has pointed to “grave irregularities” in as many as 71 AAP appointments, why focus on just nine? Maken added that AAP and the BJP were colluding to make people feel pity for the former. Not that AAP leaders had a more plausible explanation. They alleged that the BJP was trying to deflect from stories about rape, misogyny and the disappearance of cash in various parts of the country. Which only works as a theory if you accept the possibility that the dismissal of a few largely anonymous backroom staff from the Delhi secretariat would cause national editors to drop Asifa en masse from the headlines.
 

AAP would have done better to not nip constantly at the BJP’s heels like an unneutered dachshund faced with a milkman

But the question still remains: what was the point of the dismissal of these advisors? It emphasises, too, how manacled the Delhi government is to the Centre, how reliant it is on collaboration for even the most minor decisions. In such circumstances, AAP would have done better to not nip constantly at the BJP’s heels like an unneutered dachshund faced with a milkman. The two parties’ mutual suspicion corrodes common sense. Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia outlandishly claimed that the entire order was a ploy to dislodge one of his closest advisors, Atishi Marlena, from her post because of her success in improving the standards of Delhi’s government schools.
 
If this sounds like nonsense, it is also true that Marlena is the best example of the kind of governance AAP promised when it came to power. She is a technocrat, holding degrees from St Stephen’s and Oxford, who is profoundly committed to public service, to providing access to opportunities for the urban poor, AAP’s core constituency. There is already talk about her now replacing former journalist Ashish Khetan as the vice chairperson of the Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi. She is also being tipped as a Lok Sabha candidate next year. Why would the Centre not just rubber-stamp her appointment, especially at a salary of Rs 1 per month?
 
Perhaps AAP is right when it says it is forced to cast covetous glances at other states because it is not being permitted to govern Delhi. How the party must rue its failure to capitalise on early momentum in Punjab. In her change.org petition, academic Ira Bhaskar writes that Marlena’s sacking is “an attack on Delhi’s children”. That might be hyperbole, but on this occasion the Centre does appear less interested in good governance than it is in petty politics. And, yes, given what AAP has had to put up with, you would cry too if it happened to you.