Vandita Mishra writes: The renovation of 6 Flag Workers Highway & different AAP tales

This newspaper has revealed particulars of the CAG report on the renovation of 6, Flag Workers Highway, workplace and residence of then Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. From the lavish splurge on curtains and carpets to far dearer substitutes for objects and fixtures, from frequent upward revision of estimates and a sample of escalation of prices to irregularities in tendering and different paperwork, it makes for a sobering learn. It looks like such an inexplicable self-goal by a celebration that broke via the excessive partitions of the system on the again of an anti-corruption motion. All of the AAP’s makes an attempt to defend itself — it has known as the controversy a diversionary tactic by the BJP, pointed to the prices of the residence, plane and fits of PM Modi, and to the truth that the CM’s residence just isn’t a private asset, will probably be allotted to others sooner or later — solely name consideration to its personal narrowing.

A celebration that claimed to vary the way in which politics is finished and to make a power-drunk system heed the on a regular basis issues of the aam aadmi, a celebration that proclaimed an ambition to re-imagine the federal government faculty and well being centre, has solely itself guilty if the dialog forward of an essential election veers to the price of the TV console and the L-shaped couch, the silk carpet and the fake leather-based cladding, within the CM’s home-office.

In its greatest model, the creation of AAP as a political occasion, its sudden emergence exterior the System, from the guts of the Anna Hazare-led motion in opposition to an apparently scam-riddled UPA regime, had held promise — it could be a departure from the pomposity and pretension, the frill and frippery of politics-as-usual, if not a substitute for the established gamers and their corrupt methods.

Its work to re-furbish the federal government faculty and its consideration to the native mohalla clinic appeared to be placing collectively a “Delhi mannequin” of governance, which might bridge the space between the political occasion and the life-world of the strange voter that had grown more and more aside. Its drawing upon a spiritual (Hindu) idiom appeared to be an fascinating and revolutionary response to a altering political panorama in occasions of BJP dominance — sidestepping the sterility of the Congress-Left vocabulary, with a view to forestall nationalism-patriotism and religion-culture from being hijacked by the BJP, or changing into a BJP monopoly.

As time went on, on all these counts, nevertheless, the AAP started to ask increasingly more questions, even because it additionally bore the brunt of the BJP’s unrelenting aggression and hostility in direction of it. It has appeared to expire of governance concepts and vitality on the one hand, and on the opposite, to throw itself far more absolutely in preventing the BJP on phrases set by the BJP.

Forward of the upcoming election, the AAP is enjoying the spiritual gimmick and stoking the polarising situation. There may be Kejriwal asserting the Pujari Granthi Samman Rashi scheme, and Chief Minister Atishi alleging that it was the L-G, not her authorities, that signed off on the demolition of temples and spiritual constructions in Delhi. Extra disquietingly, the AAP authorities has entered right into a full-blooded joust with the BJP on the problem of Rohingya and unlawful Bangladeshi immigrants in Delhi, with the political race to the underside even barging headlong into the very Delhi classroom that the AAP had earlier labored to make extra spacious and inclusive — two weeks in the past, Delhi authorities directed colleges to stop enrolment of “unlawful Bangladesh migrant” youngsters, and inform police and different authorities “in case of any doubt” a couple of scholar’s citizenship.

An embattled AAP is evidently making an attempt to take the combat to the BJP in Delhi, however within the course of it could be shedding sight of the bigger stirrings set off by the concept of AAP, and never simply in Delhi. No matter whether or not Kejriwal’s occasion wins or loses the upcoming election, 6 Flag Workers Highway, the CM’s home that he renovated extravagantly, might properly develop into the handle of a political risk that shrank itself.

Until subsequent week,

Vandita