Your Methods were Unorthodox Mr. Kejriwal

Subject : Your Methods were Unorthodox Mr. Kejriwal

Dear Mr. Kejriwal,

I will do a disservice to myself and to all right thinking citizens of this patriotic nation if I congratulate you on your assuming the mantle of Delhi. In fact, the kudos go to Congress for playing their dice cunningly. You do not deserve congratulations as you gambled your way to power by playing the dice game with them. As you are perceived honest (a thin line divides honesty from dishonesty, in your case it is a mere perception), I am giving the benefit of doubt to you and comparing you to the ‘blot less’ Dharmaraja, who too told a ‘sweet lie’ to win war. But as you played this game of dice for power, you stand in the opposite camp too. And, in the process what did you bet at stakes? Is it not the trust and confidence of few lakh voters that voted to your candidates? Draupadi, one of the most pious women, taken aback on hearing that her husband lost her in gambling, asks, “Did he lose first and lose me then or did he lose me first and then lost himself?” Delhi voters are as pious too. Now, they are asking, “Did AK lose himself to Congress before bartering our trust to the “most corrupt party” (your own words) or did he barter our interests first without our knowledge and then lost himself? To add salt to the wounds the TV channel that worked over time projecting your party is now asking the question, “Did the split begin?” within 12 hours of your announcing the “marriage of convenience” or “live in and out relation” , one inside and the other outside. The answer is as imponderable as your own personality traits.

I adhere to the dictum that in politics personal life of a leader, even a ‘bete noir’ should not be commented upon as that speaks poorly about the commentator. But, when personality traits of a leader reflect in his qualities of leadership that affect the state, as is your case, it is but apt to discuss your life pattern as known to me. You were born into a rich family with all comforts and well educated in reputed institutions. From then on, you placed your two feet on two boats that reflected a sense of indecision and vacillation in deciding which way to go. You were in and out of work. The same trait was evident in your ‘fight against corruption’ under the banner of IAC. While being a loyal follower of Anna Hazare you set your eyes high on fighting the system from within by leading it. Mahatma never had this ambition in his life. Nor did Mother Theresa, whose life had been inspiration to you. There is nothing wrong in trying to cleanse a system, of which you too have been part all these years but now suddenly realised that only you could cleanse it. But as Mahatma Gandhi said always, ” Means should justify ends”. But you went the opposite direction. For you, ends justified means.

To discuss this, I shall quote a minor event in your life that speaks for itself about the way you think and act. After all, masks are masks and one day the real faces come out. You resigned your post in IRS, a high paying job, in 2006. In fact it goes to your credit that you donated your money won under Ramon Magsayasay Award to an NGO. (I do not have details of the NGO or its organizers). There was a condition attached to your service that you should work for minimum three years on rejoining after two years’ study leave . To circumvent this clause you worked for 18 months and went on unpaid leave for 18 months and claimed this period on unpaid leave as “on duty”. As a well educated, socially responsible citizen in high government job you must have known that “unpaid” leave did not count as service. But you feigned ignorance and fought the ‘system’. Why? Was it to find a ‘loophole’ somewhere? What happened was part of history. Here, your ends of avoiding paying back 18 months’ salary to the government justified the means you adopted, feigning ignorance of CCS rules. The larger question here is, ” If you wanted to circumvent a CCS rule for your benefit, what moral right do you have to question the system and call all others as corrupt?” Corruption too is a state of mind. A person need not be physically corrupt to be called “dishonest”.

Your very intention of not paying the dues of government knowing fully well that you needed to pay amounted to dishonesty. I will narrate a small moral story. Two friends wanted to spend an evening. One suggested they go to a “dancing girl” programme and the other went to a temple. The one that saw the dance went to Heaven and the one that went to temple went to hell. The latter asked the King of hell the reason. He told, “You went to temple but rued about what joy you missed. He went to dance but mused over what righteous pleasure you were having in the temple.” You were in government service for 11 years out of which you were on leave for 3.5 years. Do you call that honesty? If all in government service in Delhi emulate you, will you be able to run government? We make the system or mar the system. What did you do? Please just ponder over.

Another major trait evident in your personal or public life is that you leave a job half finished and jump on to the other. I go back to the days when you were conducting press conferences to expose the corrupt. One day you claimed you got ‘clinching’ evidence on the trust run by the wife of Salman Khurshid. You went the whole hog of challenging him on his own turf. But suddenly you changed tack as if there was pressure on you from unknown quarters. You shifted gears and targeted Nitin Gadkari with flimsy charges. I still remember the day. I commented that this was being done to malign a particular party, as they were right wing, and whatever corruption charges were being hurled on Congress leaders were only a red herring. And you stopped pursuing the case of even Gadkari too after he was not given extension. As per Khurshid he was promoted and you seemed happy about it and kept quiet. From then on you shifted gears again and started projecting yourself as a “protector” of the rotten system. And you forgot to target “corrupt” leaders in the process. Your leap from IAC to AAP is another indicator of this trait.

Then comes your real trait. You tend to criticize for the sake of criticism. Fact of life is that after some time people tend to ignore you. Criticism is the very essence of public life. But there are variations. Criticism can be constructive, destructive and/or self-destructive. From day one I saw you in public life, you adopted a destructive and self-destructive method of criticism. It is unorthodox, though it may give immediate results as has happened in your case. In the long run, though, it will destroy the system as a whole and consume you too. You started with a “Jan Lokpal” demand that was reasonable. Then you shifted gears. You gave an impression that all in the system were corrupt except you and your cronies. Yet, the fact that you are untested in public life leaves a question mark on your claims. In all your wisdom, you should have known that no system is foolproof. There was a Ravan where there was a Lord Ram and a Duryodhan for a Dharmaraja. Angels and demons are said to be cousins and co-exist. It is not like that there is only one angel for all the demons to be fought with.

Another trait is you tend to make promises beyond your capacity. You told Delhi voters that you would slash power bills by 50% and supply 700 litres of water free of charge. You never calculated the financial implications of such promises. You can sign an order and say you have fulfilled the promise. But what will be the long term implication? Will it not lead to more unorthodox and bizarre practices? Will you tax the public to make up the deficit? You promised Jan Lokpal knowing fully well there would be no Lokpal at state level. Lokayuktha is already in place and you could have promised improvements in the existing laws to make it foolproof. No. But you wanted the whole credit. Then, on statehood yours was a hollow promise. Now, you say that you will sit on dharna at Raisina Hill. Most laughable, to say the least.

Now that you will be Chief Minister of Delhi for at least a few months, people or at least the 30% voters who voted you want answers for the nagging questions given your track record in your professional and public life.

1) Now that you are in an “unnatural relationship” with your avowed bete noir, the most corrupt Congress party, will you opt for a divorce by yourself or wait for them to walk out on you? Or will you continue the unnatural relationship much to the discomfiture of your voters? 

2).Out of a total service of about 14 years, you were on leave for about four and half years. Leaving aside private service, you availed leave of absence of about 31/2 years of public service shirking your responsibilities almost 25% of time. Can an Aam Aadmi that has to work daily for meeting both ends meet, have this luxury at tax payers’ money? And as CM will you assure him of such a luxury? 

3) The moot question is, will you, who are accustomed to go on long leaves in pursuit of other avocations, be not tempted to repeat the feat as CM too and go on long leaves? Your assurances have no value. We already knew you assured us that you would prefer opposition benches than unnatural allies and today you did the opposite. For this, you adopted another unorthodox method, mostly used by Hitler and Mussolini, of referendum. There is no audit of the results of referendum. It was an in-house job. 

4) Will you follow rules by the book and abide even if they affect you personally or will you feign ignorance of rules, as you did in the past, to abdicate responsibility? 

5) Will you still be tempted to jump from one task to another, in the process leaving all jobs unfinished, as has been your trait through life? 

6) Will you, at least now, stop picking holes in all others or will you fit into the system that you were highly critical all these years? 

7) Finally, will you excuse any citizen that revolts against the system in the name of civil disobedience, if he finds your methods unpalatable to him? That was what you did by reconnecting power supply climbing an electric pole. Do you not feel it will lead to lawlessness?

Either you do not know how government functions or you wear the mask of ignorance. You wanted to interpolate the functions of civil society and government. Civil society is a watchdog that oversees the functioning of governments. It is difficult for them to govern in the normal course. And governments can not afford to be all that civil as civil society expects. Intricacies of governance involve compromises here and there. Only when these exceed limits and those governing involve in violations for selfish interests, civil society has a job on hand. To paint each by the same brush is not art. It is recipe for disaster. And you chose one of the best Chief Ministers Congress ever had in the country to be painted bad and you are attempting to do the same with some BJP Chief Ministers. In the process, you are only killing the system instead of curing it. Do you want to be a professional surgeon or a quack that operates with a butcher’s knife? We wait to see.

On a cautionary note, let the initial aberrations of your behavioural patterns not lead to a bigger chaos in future. Being highly erudite you must be aware of the “theory of chaos” in mathematics, where the present is deterministic of the future but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. Let not the Delhi citizens suffer from future chaos for minor aberrations in their initial preference of the party to be in power.

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P.S.: By the time I am posting this, news channels are agog with news that fissures developed in AAP on ministry formation and one top member of the party is trying to strike a compromise. This proves my above point, ” Intricacies of governance involve compromises here and there.”

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