By Sidharth Mishra

Last week, soon after the arrest of second in command of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Manish Sisodia, party leader Arvind Kejriwal said, “The AAP is a storm. No wall, no mountain in the world is strong enough to stop this storm. No one can stop the idea whose time has come. AAP’s time has come.”

Delhi chief minister has travelled thus far in politics on building perceptions. These perceptions are fabricated largely on letting loose a narrative with the right choice of phrases and words. He is a fine communicator and so one must look at him in awe when he compares the cases of corruption heaped on his party leaders with the racial discrimination against the Blacks in the United States.

The words – Our time has come – were first famously used by Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, an American political activist and Baptist minister, who was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. The context of his speech was that the time had come for Black population of the United States to claim their rightful place in American society and politics. 

When Jackson announced his campaign for President of the United States in the 1984 election, he became the second African American (after Shirley Chisholm) to mount a nationwide campaign for president as a Democrat. In the Democratic primaries, Jackson surprised many when he took third place behind Senator Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale, who eventually won the nomination. Many years later he endorsed Barack Obama’s candidature but later fell out with him.

Coming back to Kejriwal and the AAP, their time has not come now but it came a decade ago when social activist Anna Hazare launched Indian Against Corruption movement with Kejriwal as its pincer. It was one of its kind movement which saw a huge participation of largely apolitical middle-class vowing one from among them to take on the much-resented political establishment.

It was only matter of time before this apolitical movement turned into a political party and soon after took on the colour and ‘candour’ of any other political ensemble in the country. Kejriwal was soon to make his political ambitions clear – go for the top political job of the country. In this journey he quickly changed gears and became part of a political system which he initially had set out to clean.

In this passage he however left behind many in his brazen ways to counter charges of non-governance and corruption. Never before a Minister is known to have lived in a jail for good nine months like Satyender Jain did. He quit the office since his another colleague too came to occupy the same barracks. No one has lowered benchmarks of probity in public life as Kejriwal and AAP has done.

Not going into the charges of corruption levelled, the now abandoned excise policy, which has landed Sisodia and several others behind the bars, also created a social concern. The cheap availability of liquor, one free bottle with every bottle purchased, created upheaval in several households. The joke was since Kejriwal gave women a free ride in the buses, they should not grudge a free liquor bottle to their spouses even if it all ended in the increased cases of domestic violence.   

In this political battle Kejriwal and his party would win some elections and lose some but it’s unlikely that he would every regain the confidence of the huge mass of people who came to support him in Ramlila Maidan more than 10 years ago. His time had come then, which he frittered away for the lust of power and political position.

(First published in The Morning Standard)