Dear reader,
Politics makes for strange bedfellows. Or maybe extraordinary situations warrant extraordinary steps. Be that as it may, the irony was not lost on anyone when the Congress-led INDIA bloc announced a Maha Rally at Ramlila Grounds in New Delhi on March 31 to protest the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal by the Enforcement Directorate. The bitter feud between the two parties has been the stuff of much media fodder, each periodically accusing the other of being the BJP’s B team.
Ironically also, the same Ramlila Grounds served as the nerve centre of the anti-corruption (read anti-Congress) agitation by Anna Hazare in 2011, of which Kejriwal was a key constituent. Then he was on the stage. Now, others will be on the stage for him.
This is also where Kejriwal took oath as Chief Minister of Delhi in 2013 and 2015, saying he was the people’s leader. Will the protest at these famous grounds named after Ram provide him succour this time?
As Opposition parties raise their voice in support of Kejriwal, calling his arrest a blot on democracy, one recalls that the Congress party’s senior leader Sandeep Dikshit had in February advised him to appear before the ED instead of skipping the repeated summons. Kejriwal had not heeded his advice. Dikshit, incidentally, is the son of Delhi’s longest-serving Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit (1998-2013), who was defeated by Arvind Kejriwal from the New Delhi Assembly constituency in December 2013, following a series of corruption allegations against her. The accuser now stands accused of corruption in the alleged New Delhi liquor policy scam.
Every inch of the historic Ramlila Grounds has been witness to history. Before and after Independence, it served as a venue for big political events and rallies. In 1961, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru welcomed Queen Elizabeth II here during her visit to India. In 1963, Lata Mangeshkar sang her timeless song “Ai mere watan ke logon” in the presence of Nehru at this very venue after India’s defeat in the 1962 Indo-China war. This was also the venue where Lal Bahadur Shastri as Prime Minister coined the “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” slogan in 1965. And, more than three decades before the Anna Andolan, the veteran of protest politics Jayaprakash Narayan addressed a rally here.
Some of the biggest events in recent history too have taken place at the Ramlila Grounds. The place where Ravan, Meghnad, and Kumbhakaran are consigned to the flames every Dussehra in a grand spectacle, has become significant as the venue of frenetic political activity, located as it is in the confluence of old and new Delhi, a place where destinies are made and destroyed.
This is where, during a police crackdown, when he was leading a hunger strike against black money in June 2011, yoga guru Ramdev had escaped wearing a woman’s salwar kameez and covering his head with a dupatta. More than 30 people were injured in the lathi-charge when Ramdev bolted.
Today, Kejriwal has said he will run the government from behind bars, but it is good to remember just how damaging his allegations proved for his new-found friend, the Congress, and how it ceded the ground for the blossoming of the saffron party that is now his inimical enemy. The Congress is yet to recover from that onslaught, having been reduced to zero seats in two successive Vidhan Sabha elections even as the Aam Aadmi Party romped home with 67 seats in 2015 and only a handful less in 2020. This, however, did not translate into Lok Sabha seats for the AAP, with the BJP winning all seven Lok Sabha seats in 2014 and 2019.
The two defeats might explain the urgency in AAP’s concession of three seats to the Congress in Delhi despite declaring that the party did not deserve even one. Now that the deal is done, both parties hope they can halt the BJP juggernaut in the capital.
In another sign of the new camaraderie between the Congress and AAP, the seasoned lawyer and Congress party spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi has come on board as Kejriwal’s counsel. The Delhi Chief Minister was a surprise guest at a lunch hosted by Singhvi in February. In fact, Kejriwal and Atishi from AAP were the only significant non-Congress leaders at Singhvi’s event. The bonhomie between Kejriwal and the Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge at that event was clearly a precursor to the two parties announcing a 4-3 seat-sharing arrangement in Delhi. And, despite the past bitterness and the continued sparks and isolated outbursts from leaders on both sides, the surprising Congress-AAP alliance is intact in Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Goa, and Chandigarh.
The volte-face has seen Kejriwal getting the support of the Congress leaders who matter. Condemning the “egregious arrest” of Kejriwal, Congress general secretary in charge of the organisation K.C. Venugopal called it “nothing but a systematic targeting of the Opposition by the ruling regime”. A delegation of Opposition parties submitted an urgent memorandum to the Election Commission of India against the “illegal, unconstitutional, and anti-democratic” use of central agencies, which had destroyed a level playing field for the opposition in the upcoming Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.
On the agenda of the Ramlila Grounds protest is also the freezing of the Congress party’s accounts by the IT Department one month before the election, but Kejriwal’s arrest has dominated the discourse. In fact, the arrest is giving him a larger-than-life image in Opposition circles. However, only those who have not closely followed Kejriwal’s career trajectory will be surprised at this turn.
A qualified mechanical engineer who came into the civil services at the age of 24, he was soon disgruntled with the system and resigned to work in Sunder Nagari slums, a decision that got him the Ramon Magsaysay Award. He soon got involved with the India Against Corruption movement started by Anna Hazare, and went on to form his own political party, against the advice of his mentor Hazare. After an enthusiastic start, AAP soon became a one-man show and the likes of Yogendra Yadav, Prashant Bhushan, and Anand Kumar parted ways with varying degrees of dignity. Kejriwal, however, who had by now made the good old broom the symbol of the common man’s resistance, did not give up nor did his party. Now, Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan are among those backing the Delhi Chief Minister, saying his arrest is a watershed moment in India’s slide towards full-blown tyranny.
Kejriwal once called himself an “anarchist”. Having risen to the top as a crusader against corruption, being arrested in a corruption case seems to fit the martyrdom myth he has built around himself. There are many who even credit his arrest as being supremely well-timed for his campaign this time. Whether this proves to be a masterstroke for the BJP or the AAP is a question to which the answer is blowing in the political winds at Ramlila Grounds.
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Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline
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