(Rana Ayyub is an award-winning investigative journalist and political writer. She is working on a book on Prime Minister Narendra Modi which will be published later this year.)

A well-meaning psephologist once told me that he found an uncanny resemblance between Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal. Both would lead their respective parties to victory, both great orators and both autocratic with zero tolerance to dissenting voices and ideas. Both also have equally unyielding second-in-commands and confidantes.



A week before the Delhi elections and in many other editorials in the last three years, I have consistently maintained that Kejriwal, despite being a mass leader who had his pulse on the ground, a man whose party named and shamed various business houses, risked being a cult, endangering the prospects of the Aam Aadmi Party.



It was Kejriwal's arrogance which led to the AAP's defeat in the Lok Sabha elections last year and later his humility which allowed the party to rout both the BJP and the Congress in Delhi. And the reason it managed this thunderous victory was the belief of the people of Delhi that the AAP was not a party that was remote-controlled by the High Command and that differentiated it from the other two parties.



When Sanjay Singh, member of the AAP political affairs committee tweeted this morning, "The people who want to remove Arvind Kejriwal from the National Convenor's, do they know what the worker is feeling?" was a sense of deja vu.



The tweet was clearly aimed at two leaders who were seen as the ideological backbone of the party, which has in recent times enjoyed the support of left leaning students and academics alike - Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav. Bhushan, whose views on Kashmir and plebiscite were rejected by the AAP last year - had confided in friends a few months ago, his decision to quit the party right after the Delhi elections. His father Shanti Bhushan, an ex law minister, endorsed the candidacy of Kiran Bedi as presumptive Delhi chief minister by AAP, a move which was seen as belittling Kejriwals image in his party.



But Prashant Bhushan, who had shot off a letter to AAP with a set of what he called 'concrete steps' to be the party with a difference, rubbishes the claim. In a conversation with me this morning, Prashant laughed off allegations that suggested that his rebellion was a calculated move with the backing of finance Minister Arun Jaitley. It must be noted that Prashant Bhushan has been in the news also for the mail leaks from Essar which establishes a corporate- journalist- politics nexus and named Nitin Gadkari as one of the beneficiaries.



Sources in the Aam Aadmi Party who refused to come on record, alleged that Prashant's public interest litigation in the Essar leaks smacked of connivance with Jaitley to help further his ambition in the BJP. Gadkari's less than cordial relations with Jaitley is no news and the fact that Prashant's PIL also names a journalist who is associated with the AAP, as a beneficiary of Essar largesse is being seen with suspicion.



On his part , Bhushan dismisses these allegations as the imagination of a fertile mind "My joining the BJP or aligning with Jaitley is next to impossible. What I sought from the AAP is what I wrote in the letter, a clean model of governance that the masses voted us for."





Another leader in the eye of the storm is psephologist Yogendra Yadav who co-authored the charter of demands for AAP with Prashant Bhushan and is now the target of AAP ire. AAP wants the two leaders out for their dissenting views on various subjects.The note authored by the two asks for: the setting up of an internal ethics committee, a probe into cheques of over 50 lacs received in the form of donations by the party, allowing state units of AAP to work on strategy rather than have Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia and the rest make decisions for them, record minutes of national executive meetings and the PAC and make it public to the aam aadmi.What has been seen as the last straw in the deepening rift between Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan and the others is an unofficial executive meeting that took place a day after the national executive of the party met on February 26.On February 26, Kejriwal had offered to resign as national convenor, which was then rejected. It was followed by a decision which according to those close to Bhushan was taken by the coterie that surrounds Kejriwal, allowing the latter to reconstitute the PAC, paving the way for the exit of Yadav and Bhushan from political decision-making processes.As a left leaning intellectual close to Prashant added, "Isn't this the cult culture we as a party stood vehemently against? If the likes of Sisodia and Sanjay Singh like to reap political benefits by lending a cult image to Arvind Kejriwal and make it an autocratic party which suffocates dissenting voices and opinions, then this must be the beginning of the decline of the AAP and everything that it stood for."

While the success story of AAP might continue unabated with both the Left and Congress in an abysmal disarray in Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal needs to shed the autocratic image that he has refused to detach himself from.His party enjoys the reputation of a socialist image whose beauty lies in the pluralism of views and ideas, not just of its leaders but also of the aam aadmi. If Arvind wants the AAP to be a party with a difference, he needs to apply the same logic of propriety that he expects from other political parties and alleged crony capitalists. Let Arvind Kejriwal not be the prototype of the political leader George Bernard Shaw described as, "he knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."

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