Another Joker Resigns From AAP

On 24 November 2012, after 500 odd activists of India Against Corruption gathered at the Constitution Club, New Delhi — out of them,150 odd were not let in and they left, disgruntled — to adopt the constitution of the Aam Aadmi Party. Some of them, 23 to be precise, were arbitrarily chosen and paraded on the stage as members of its national executive.

Additionally, six were made members of the Political Affairs Committee (PAC). Considered ex-post facto, these 23 were found to be sharing two factors: the candidate had to be a beneficiary of Ford Foundation or s/he had to have a good exposure to realpolitik.

Ilyas Azmi, who resigned from the AAP the day before yesterday, belonged to the second category along with Prem Singh Pahari, a turncoat from the BJP and Sanjay Singh, a former aide of Mulayam Singh Yadav.Azmi had hopped, skipped and jumped from the Bahujan Samaj Party, Welfare Party of India and Rashtriya Inquilab Party.

While many of those assembled there were yet to learn about Singh’s antecedents, the announcement of Pahari’s and Azmi’s names was greeted with boos.

In the last more than three years of its existence, a purportedly idealist AAP has witnessed many resignations on non-ideological grounds. Do these peeved elements want us to believe that everything is alright about the party except for the fact that they were individually offered a raw deal?

Azmi’s grouse is that the party does not have adequate representation of the backward classes and minorities. “The party has become (Arvind) Kejriwal’s fiefdom,” he says.What he does not want you to know is that he had been eyeing a place in the party’s PAC since November 2012 and, in the recent national council meeting of the AAP, he was denied that place yet again.

• The first jokers to leave the pack called themselves BAAP or Bharatiya Aam Aadmi Parivar. In mid-2013, this faction revolted against the party high command on the ground that they were not being nominated for the Delhi elections due later that year.
• Then Rakesh Agarwal,known for his activism for auto-rickshaw drivers,left or was made to leave.The Kejriwal-Manish Sisodia-headed party accused Agarwal of fraud and Agarwal shot back, asking why the AAP was not responding to “serious issues” of party management that he had raised.
• The next set of deserters hailed from the Uttam Nagar Assembly constituency. They complained that a ration mafia kingpin Deshraj Raghav was made the AAP candidate from the area while their “eligible” contender had been ignored. They demonstrated outside the Metro station of the area for days on end — to no avail. Even a damning interrogation by chief editor of India TV Rajat Sharma on his show Aap ki Adalat could not persuade Kejriwal to change the dubious candidate from Uttam Nagar that year.
• Next, after the BJP refused to run the local government powered by 32 MLAs, the AAP agreed to step in following a spectacle of “referendum” on whether its 28 MLAs should govern Delhi with outside support of 8 Congress MLAs of the time. At this juncture, Vinod Kumar Binny sulked for not being made a minister. In the 2015 election, he fought on a BJP ticket (and lost).
• If Binny sulked in December 2013, it was Madhu Bhaduri’s turn in January 2014. She left the party in a huff, complaining that she was not allowed to pass a resolution against the then Delhi Law Minister Somnath Bharti’s “raid” on African-origin women in Malviya Nagar’s Khirki Extension, a neighbourhood in south Delhi.
• Then the AAP fell flat on its face in the Lok Sabha election, as did Shazia Ilmi who fought for it from Ghaziabad. It was her turn to howl in protest. This was the second time that the party had given her a “bad” seat to contest from — the previous occasion being the 2013 contest from R.K. Puram, which she lost by the narrowest margin in that election.She resigned from the AAP and joined the BJP in due course. Of course, denying her a seat from where she could have won was not a reason she cited officially for her resignation.
• Again during the Lok Sabha election campaign, the founder of Air Deccan Captain GR Gopinath suddenly disappeared from the television screens that he had hogged for a while as an AAP spokesman as did former bureaucrat Arun Bhatia. Gopinath’s reason was ostensibly Kejriwal’s “agitational” politics — never mind whether Shazia’s“reason” was inspired by Gopinath’s or it was the other way round — while Bhatia was more forthright about his annoyance. Interestingly, a high-flying corporate woman Meera Sanyal had yet another non-ideological reason to stay in the AAP. In her initial appearances on television, she would say that, while the BJP was closest to following market economics, she couldn’t think of herself as part of a “communal” party. That is to say that she would rather follow an impression created by media than facts of governance on record.
• Finally, after the AAP registered an unprecedented victory in the Delhi Vidhan Sabha elections of 2015, it kicked out its former socialist darlings Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav. Along with the duo, a whole lot of volunteers who belonged to that faction left the party. [The term “volunteer” is curious. Nobody knows why the AAP does not call them “cadre” while it uses a term coined by an organization it hates — the RSS whose affiliates are called swayamsevaks, which means volunteers. But let that be.]
• Amidst all these episodes of drama, the founding members and then subsequent members kept resigning from the party in hundreds, with some sets coming together to form Aam Aadmi Sena or AAS. Each of these sets of deserters asked yours truly at different points in time when they resigned whether I would join them in an effort to restore the AAP’s founding “ideals”! When I asked them what their faction’s economic policy would be, they only drew blank faces.

Overall, all except two former members who have left the AAP have had a one-point grouse: ‘Why was my candidate or I denied a rightful place in the party?’ The other deserter who left on an ideological ground is advocate Ashwini Upadhyay, who used to head AAP’s legal cell. He kept alleging that the party leadership was in touch with some anti-national elements until he was expelled. He is now in the BJP just as the Ilmi siblings are as is Binny[Shazia’s brother Aijaz had moved from the Congress to the BJP before the Lok Sabha election].

Kejriwal’s accusation against Upadhyay was that the latter had wanted a Vidhan Sabha election ticket and when denied, he decided to revolt.. The allegation was baseless. That separates the advocate from the rest of the flock mentioned in bullets above. But Upadhyay is no advocate of market freedom or individual liberty. His correspondence with various media houses, where he proudly declares that he has petitioned the Supreme Court to make the curricula of Indian school-going students uniform across the nation, shows he is as socialistic as the party he is no more a part of.

And as much as our magazine is frustrated by the fact that the Narendra Modi government is not quite different from the de facto Sonia Gandhi government in terms of economic policy — refer to the continuation of MGNREGA, Food Security Act, Right to Education Act, etc and bureaucracy-dependent new schemes like Mudra Bank and Stand-Up India — I have a personal experience to add to it.

Since my resignation from the AAP on 21 November 2013 immediately following the release of its economically disastrous manifesto, I have been asked by several BJP leaders and ordinary members alike why I did not inform them beforehand that I was resigning. This was so they could formulate a strategy to cash in on the news in the campaign of that year. They still wonder why I make such a fuss of economic policy when no political party in India is clear about it.

It is annoying, to say the least, that commoners and politicians by and large look at a journalist as a party loyalist rather than an ideologically committed person.

Since normality and abnormality are decided by statistics, perhaps none out of the members of BAAP Agarwal, Binny, Bhaduri, Ilmi, Gopinath, Bhatia or the activists of AAS, etc is a joker. I am! So why does the title of this article refer to Azmi as a joker? Because Swarajya is ideological.