Some people have asked me why I don’t join Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The short answer is that AAP is a full-blown socialist party, a replica of Congress and BJP – and in many ways much worse.

By 2010 I had heard only good things about Arvind Kejriwal, so I wrote to him in July 2010 to introduce him to the Freedom Team of India. I had established this team in 2008 to assemble young liberal leaders. One of our team’s members, Somnath Bharti, was hired by Arvind as a lawyer for the Commonwealth Games corruption case. On 22 February 2012 I then met Arvind at his Noida NGO office.

At that meeting I outlined the need for liberal reforms and encouraged him to join politics. IAC was not, in my view, the answer to India’s systemic problems. As part of our conversation I suggested he read my 2008 book Breaking Free of Nehru that detailed the reforms that India needs. He promised to do so, so I shared the book with him over email.

Months went by without any response despite polite reminders. By mid-November 2012 Arvind had not yet formed AAP but had started making crazy socialist statements in public. I tried one last time to stop him going down the socialist path. I wrote a blog post on the basics of good economics and sent it to him. That email he did read and responded, on 17 November 2012. He was very nasty and barked: “Kindly don’t treat urself as the last expert on economics”. He apparently knew everything under the sun already and anyone who tried to tell him that his socialist rants were wrong was a show-off trying to be “the last expert”.

This was the last straw for me. I later found, in 2018, that Arvind Kejriwal doesn’t read books at all. He just knows everything. I had a similar experience with Yogendra Yadav (who is even more to the left of Kejriwal and later parted company with him).

In brief, Kejriwal is hopelessly arrogant. And competence-wise he has nothing to show. His book, Swaraj, is pathetic and littered with so many infantile assertions that no established publisher will ever touch it. His only skill lies in public speaking and propounding populist ideas. But governance is extraordinarily complex. Acquiring some preliminary knowledge of engineering or working in the income tax department in a junior role doesn’t teach anyone prices, markets and incentives. The more ignorant a politician is about economics, the more cocksure he is that he can deliver everything through government ownership and control. That’s Kejriwal in a nutshell. This fatal conceit informs all aspects of the AAP manifesto, which is a massively interventionist socialist document.

For six years I therefore refused to engage with Arvind Kejriwal or his team. But in mid-2018,someone persuaded me to engage with yet another (this time Gurgaon-based) leader of AAP. Let’s just call him N.

Sadly, the pattern seen with Kejriwal and Yadav has continued. I suggested over phone and Whatsapp to N that he read some of my Times of India articles and SBP’s manifesto. Five months ago I finally met him but he had not read anything. He told me that no one in AAP’s leadership team has time to read anything because they are working round the clock to fix so many problems.

At this meeting I suggested that instead of spending vast amounts of taxpayer funds on a few schools, AAP should consider supporting the poor directly and get the government out of schools. I mentioned Professor James Tooley’s book The Beautiful Tree and his research in India. But N then said that Indians have nothing to learn from the likes of James Tooley because he is a “gora”. Apparently the colour of his skin precludes Tooley – who is in my view the best thinker in the entire history of education (and married to an Indian) – from researching and commenting on India.

I had to explain to this great leader of AAP that all the science and engineering that he has learnt (he is yet another IITian – and educated abroad) was entirely discovered by “goras” – so should we reject all science? Is the quality of knowledge determined by the country of its origin? India’s tradition has been to welcome good ideas from everywhere. The Rig Veda says: “Let Noble thoughts come to us from every side”.

Finally, after the meeting N said that he would ask AAP to study this matter of school reform and potentially start a pilot project but months have passed and I’ve not heard anything. Either N did nothing about it or perhaps he did discuss with Arvind who probably then cut him short because he knows everything already.

It is been a uniquely unpleasant experience trying to engage with this “good man” Kejriwal or his party. This is a party of headless chooks running about helter-skelter. They don’t know what they are doing nor what should be done to achieve real results. And they don’t have time (or rather the humility) to study economics and the Western governance system or even India’s own thinker Kautilya. They are natural-born socialists without any clue about markets, the price system or incentives but convinced that they can fix everything by directly doing it themselves. AAP’s solutions involve using the same unaccountable British imperial system of governance, the IAS, that has brought India to its knees, to take on even more responsibility by the government and to dole out ever more subsidies.

In addition, Arvind’s approach of giving tickets to all kinds of corrupt people has further proven that he is a mere opportunist. At least people of some competence, like Shashi Tharoor or Nandan Nilekani, are involved with some of the major established socialist parties of India despite the damage such involvement will do to their legacy. No one is going to touch AAP with a barge pole.