Despite his ability to recover from mistakes and setbacks, Arvind Kejriwal faces a more serious threat this time: few people are now willing to take him and his party at face value. Credibility is eroding.

The tragic death of a Rajasthani farmer at an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) rally in Delhi against the NDA's Land Acquisition Bill should tell the party's leader Arvind Kejriwal one thing: his brand of theatrics-driven politics is rapidly losing traction.

Kejriwal and his party faced media hostility and political criticism (1) for continuing with the rally even after the farmer's death, (2) for needlessly blaming the Delhi police for not rescuing the man as he swung to his death, and (3) for making insensitive comments once Gajendra Singh's death was confirmed.

Among other things, a spokesman for AAP made sarcastic remarks to the media saying that the next time he will ask the Delhi CM to climb a tree to save lives.

The spokesman has since apologised for his insensitive comments, but loose talk is not AAP’s real problem: the fact is the public is now tired of the Kejriwal brand of politics that seems to need sensational posturing, regular mud-slinging and dramatic manoeuvres to obtain media oxygen.

The public - and the media - have now come to believe that they should not take AAP and Kejriwal at face value. For a party that built its entire electoral profile by drilling holes in the credibility of mainstream political parties, that is saying something. Few people still believe AAP is straight as an arrow.

On social media yesterday (22 April), the chatter was almost wholly anti-AAP, with a few tweeters more than willing to buy the theory that the farmer's suicide may well have been plotted by the party itself. It is not a stretch to believe that AAP needed some distraction to shift the media narrative away from the recent split in the party, and to gain traction for its own anti-land bill posture, where Rahul Gandhi has taken centre-stage.

However uncharitable and unwarranted these conspiracy theories sound, what should worry Kejriwal is the serious loss of credibility he and his party have suffered. His actions since December 2013 have been wayward and contradictory, and even as he has tried to recover from one setback, his personality leads him to fall into another. Today, not too many of his own voluble supporters seem eager to take up cudgels on his behalf.

Kejriwal's two-year CV as a politician is now hardly worth flaunting, considering how many times he has let his core constituency down. Some of his misadventures since December 2013 are well known, but others have done equal damage. Many of his utterances and tactical moves have boomeranged, if not shown him in bad light.

Consider the following instances:

For a man who professed a deep commitment to inner party democracy, the nasty way in which two major dissenters – Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan – were booted out of the party suggests that AAP’s top leadership is no different from the Congress’, except for the very public washing of dirty linen.

For a man who openly advocated stings by the “aam aadmi” to bring the corrupt to book, the series of stings organised by his own former colleagues ended up devaluing the whole business of stings. Now, no one takes sting-related news seriously any more. It just makes for good TV, but then goes out of public memory.

Before the December 2013 assembly elections (and even after it), Kejriwal made the targeting of big politicians and big business his route to political one-upmanship. He got a lot of wah-wahs for naming and attempting to shame big politicians and businessmen as corrupt. But today none of that David Versus Goliath positioning is working for him.

Kejriwal made much of the fact that AAP’s funding was entirely based on transparent contributions; but just before the February Delhi assembly elections, we saw that Rs 2 crore of unknown contributions mysteriously landed in AAP’s coffers, and neither Kejriwal nor his party looked good after that.



Kejriwal protested loudly about the BJP’s efforts to allegedly break his party to avoid another Delhi election. But a sting showed him planning to woo Congress legislators to form a government.

He talked loudly about the Lokpal bill and even made the Congress-BJP attempt to prevent its introduction in the Delhi assembly in February 2014 a reason for quitting as CM. But this time we are hearing nothing about the bill, even though it has been more than three months after AAP was elected. Maybe it will come later, but it stands in sharp contrast to the extreme urgency he showed earlier.

Having got his comeuppance in Varanasi, where he took on Narendra Modi and lost miserably, Kejriwal made amends in Delhi by apologising for abandoning the voters and taking them for granted. Delhi forgave him when his banner ads promised “Paanch Saal Kejriwal”. But soon after being elected with a thumping majority, the first thing he did was make his close associate, Manish Sisodia, Deputy CM – something totally unnecessary when the people elected him as the city’s CEO. Kejriwal himself holds no portfolio.

He loudly claimed that power and office were not his party’s aim, but as soon as he was given 67 MLAs to work with, he realised that expectations of office were high in his party too. The law did not allow him to have more than seven ministers, so he made 21 MLAs parliamentary secretaries, each with ministerial status but without pay.

In his last stint as CM, he made a big show of consulting his people before taking up the job of CM with Congress support. But when it came to quitting, no consultations were needed.

“Meri aukaat kya hai?”, he asked rhetorically to suggest that leaders are created by popular movements and the public. But every decision of AAP has Kejriwal’s imprint on it. The aam aadmi is merely there for the choreography.

It is not my case that Kejriwal cannot recover from his setbacks – he has shown great resilience in the past – but he has to grow up. If he does not, he will soon be facing the dungheap of history. Worse, he will have destroyed the public's faith in the possibility of honest politics.