Capital Punishment For AAP

The Aam Aadmi Party, after the delirious rise, seems completely adrift now. Is the Delhi MCD poll debacle the beginning of the end?

- Shougat Dasgupta

The Aam Aadmi Party was adamant, after the disappointment in Punjab and Goa, that these defeats did not represent an existential crisis. Its faith must surely now be wavering as it surveys the wreckage of its performance in Delhi’s municipal elections where it was beaten into a distant second place by the BJP. “This is the end,” says Prashant Bhushan, once a leading light in AAP, his legal activism reflective of the party’s combative approach to the status quo. Bhushan, alongside Yogendra Yadav, fell out prominently with Arvind Kejriwal but he still sounded saddened by the Delhi CM’s fall from grace.

Kejriwal, at his best, was the mad hatter of Indian politics, the Shakespearean fool who dared to speak truth to power. In the character of the ‘Muffler Man’, he seemed to represent an impossible dream: the ordinary man, physically unprepossessing, with no particular advantage of birth or personality, succeeding through sheer orneriness, through a bloody-minded willingness to confront political corruption and entitlement. Of late, though, Kejriwal’s spikiness, his gumption, had curdled into paranoia, into an unlikeable surliness. “We were fooled,” Bhushan admits. “I didn’t see that he was a man without principle, without ideology. That he would stop at nothing to achieve political power, to win votes.”