Unable to introduce priority legislation in Delhi Assembly

Thwarted from introducing the Delhi Jan Lokpal Bill, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal resigned on Friday, 48 days after he assumed power, and recommended the dissolution of the State Assembly.
In a letter sent to President Pranab Mukherjee through Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung, Mr. Kejriwal recommended the “immediate conduct” of elections.
The resignation came hours after his government could not introduce the Bill in the Delhi Assembly as 42 MLAs — 32 of the BJP, eight of the Congress and one of the Janata Dal (United) and an Independent — opposed it in the 70-member Assembly.
While announcing his resignation to cheering supporters at his party office, where he went from the Assembly, with his trademark muffler around his head, Mr. Kejriwal attacked the Congress and the BJP for stalling the anti-corruption legislation and linked it with his government’s decision to register an FIR against Reliance Industries head Mukesh Ambani.
“When we tried to pass the Delhi Jan Lokpal, the Congress and the BJP ganged up to stall it. Why did this happen? Because three days back, we registered an FIR against Mukesh Ambani who runs this country. For last 10 years, he was backing the UPA government, but for the last one year, he is behind Narendra Modi. From where does Mr. Modi get so much money?” he asked alleging a “nexus” among the Congress, the BJP and Mr. Ambani.
“People from the Congress and the BJP know if this law is brought in, their leaders will end up in jail. They realised that after we booked Mukesh Ambani and Union Minister Veerappa Moily, if we pass the Jan Lokpal Bill then other senior leaders like Sharad Pawar and Kamal Nath may be next in line,” he said.
Before facing defeat on the introduction of the Bill in the afternoon, the Assembly was repeatedly disrupted in the morning as the Congress and the BJP demanded that Speaker M.S. Dhir read out a written “message” from the Lieutenant Governor over the constitutional status of the Bill. The Bill was listed as the last item, but it ended up dominating the Assembly proceedings.
Finally, Mr. Dhir read out the message and allowed the Chief Minister to table the Bill and directed a discussion on it. This led to chaos and the House had to be adjourned and the Speaker called an all-party meeting.
When the Assembly reconvened, the Speaker decided to get a sense of the House whether the Bill could be introduced, where the motion was defeated. Apart from 27 MLAs of AAP, its rebel MLA, Vinod Kumar Binny, voted in its favour.
Reacting to Mr. Kejriwal’s resignation, Delhi Congress chief Arvinder Singh said: “We did not withdraw our support. Had that been the case, we would not have supported the Appropriation Bill that was taken for voting after the Lokpal Bill.”
BJP leader Harsh Vardhan appeared surprised, saying he did not believe that Mr. Kejriwal would actually carry out his threat to resign.
Features of Delhi Jan Lokpal Bill
1. Provides for establishment of Lokpal to investigate offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.
2. Provides for expeditious investigation and prosecution of offenders to deal with “corruption, public grievances and non-delivery of services.”
3. The Jan Lokpal shall have “administrative, financial and functional independence from the government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi.”
4. “Transparency in administration and probity in public life” should be the twin responses of an efficient and effective administration. “Corruption is a key factor in economic underperformance and the major obstacle to poverty alleviation and development and general disenchantment in public.”
5. In a departure from the central Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2014, the Bill provides for redress of public grievances and protection to whistleblowers. The Jan Lokpal shall have jurisdiction over the Chief Minister, Council of Ministers, Members of Legislative Assembly members of local bodies and any category of permanent, contractual or non-permanent employees engaged by the government and members of public authority.
6. Any investigation under the Act shall be conducted by the Jan Lokpal investigation officer, who shall be a Group-A officer. After approval of the Jan Lokpal, the Director of Prosecution shall, within 30 days, file a case before the Special Court.
7. The ombudsman shall have the powers to suo motu initiate appropriate action on receiving information about corruption. The officers authorised to investigate an offence under the Act shall have the same powers as vested in a police officer under the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973.
8. The Jan Lokpal shall comprise a chairperson and six other members.
9. The ombudsman will have the powers to recruit investigating officers. It will be empowered to temporarily attach property and assets acquired by accused public servants in certain cases as well as recommend cancellation or modification of licence, lease pacts etc if obtained by corrupt means.
10. It shall have the powers to issue directions for transfer or suspension of an accused person under investigation if it is apprehended that the person may tamper with evidence or influence witnesses.

Aam Aadmi: Decoding the Media Logics

The victory of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is hailed as heralding a new era of urban politics in India, a sign of citizens finally waking up to the call of cleansing “dirty politics”. Riding on the sentiment of challenging legacy parties and their unscrupulous politics of stealth and loot, AAP has made an impressive foray into electoral combat by combining rhetoric with hard organisational work. In the recently concluded Delhi elections, the party meticulously organised door-to-door campaigning to strike a direct connection with the voters, kept the fund-raising fully transparent with all the details made available on their website, fielded their candidates only after ensuring they faced no criminal charges, and prepared customised manifestos for the assembly constituencies with an appeal that reached out to the middle class as well as the poor.
Although these have been the ideals of “clean” electoral politics, the stupendous hypocrisy among a large crop of politicians and political parties has meant that they are used not as guidelines to be followed, but as grounds to discredit the opponents. The silent pact of performing opposition while remaining wedded to the same rules of realpolitik and looting of natural resources through ugly channels of liberalisation seem to have pushed the “common man” to a brink.
‘Mediatisation’
AAP represents a sentiment that is immensely supported and shaped by the “mainstream” media, which stands in stark contrast to the deeply hostile media reception of Maoism and radical left politics opposing mindless appropriation of liberalisation by the elite and continued forms of historical injustice. The argument that AAP is a “media creation” is quite well known, which sometimes also suggests that the party and the anti-corruption movement that bore it are somewhat unstable, lacking the wherewithal of “solid” politics.
Whatever lens we adopt, it is hard to dispute that this non-legacy party has relied on the symbolic resources of media more than any other contem­porary political outfit. Even more, this reliance constitutes a deeper process of “mediatisation” in which the cultural, social and political spheres become increasingly dependent on the organisational, technological and aesthetic functioning of media (Hjarvard 2008) in ways that they turn into forms or formats suitable for media representation (Couldry 2008). One need not assume a universalist media logic and its unquestioned hege­mony to see the merit in the argument that media resources have become more ­important for all domains of public life in the current moment of rapid expansion of media, including most pro­minently the way politics is played and experienced.
The deeply mediatised nature of AAP politics, then, requires some analysis of the media logics that are at work. By the same measure, it is important to question whether these logics can retain the momentum beyond the euphoria of citizen activism, and its current location in rapidly shifting megacities such as Delhi.
How do we trace the media’s shoring up of anti-corruption sensibility and its work in turning this into a political force? How is this form distinct from the investigative, anti-establishment journalism triggered in the post-Emergency years by newspapers such as The Indian Express? What institutional changes prompted commercial private media to take up the cause in all its distinctness, with all its trappings? Some of these questions could be answered if we examine the transformation of print news media in the early 1990s, when the first definitive wave of liberalisation deepened the techno-optimism of the Rajiv Gandhi era and prompted newspapers such as The Times of India to articulate “New India” as the aspirational symbol.
‘New India’
Well before the “television revolution”, these articulations were set in motion to legitimise the Indian state’s aggressive drive towards privatisation. Central to these shifts was the imagination of a “new reader”, who was believed to be not just a passive recipient of state ­favours or passive victim of negligence, but one who demanded redressal through his own agency (mostly male in the journalistic imagination) by bringing the state to account. Three influences were crucial in this shift.
First was the growing salience of the “governance” model in international ­forums, which permeated policy circles with its attendant vocabulary of transparency, efficiency, accountability and participation, as opposed to top-down models of control and pedagogy. Newspapers such as The Times of India interpreted this as a call for greater privatisation, not only in state services, but also in a broader sense of urban renewal, when cities like Delhi and Bangalore were poised to realise the dream of ­global India by successfully becoming global cities of the third world with ­impeccable physical infrastructure and impressive “service delivery”. Citizens were celebrated as active agents demanding efficient delivery of services.
The discourse of responsibilised citizens reflected the neo-liberal logic of citizen agency, where questions of class and caste were made to appear regressive. The zeal to cleanse “traditional politics” came with the troubling underside of neo-liberal flattening, where what mattered was just “aspiration”, and any questions raising forms of cleavages and inequalities became a dangerous throwback to old-style politics.
Second, the ideology of “last-mile”, where the problem was one of delivery – the last connecting node between the state and citizens – had its obvious villain. The political class was to be blamed for all the gaps and slips. The anti-political class rhetoric combined easily with the promise of a new citizen who would persistently demand accountability and transparency. Throughout this discursive move, the political class became a metonym for the state, in that the failures of the political class were nothing but the failure of the state, which should, as soon as it can, retreat in infrastructural and other areas to ensure better results and better “service delivery”.
Third, a logic internal to the media was also significant in deepening the discourse of responsibilised citizens standing up bravely against the “debauched” political class. With the dramatic expansion of private television and new media, the problem of interactivity started to loom large within the print media, now seen unflatteringly as “traditional” media. Although new media has still not made any significant dent in the print media, journalists started to foresee their dark future, following the dramatic decline of print media in the west.
Corruption and Changing Media
To reverse the monological status of media, print media started to infuse interactivity in its daily operations by initiating a range of “reader-connect” activities. In cities like Bangalore, The Times of India organised several campaigns to actively involve the readers, and rallied them around demands for better physical infrastructure in the city – flyovers, airport, drains and garbage disposal. The English media’s world-class city discourse, thus, relied on and entailed a major transformation of newsrooms, not only with their shrinking editorial autonomy and rise of market-driven news agendas – a story now well known in popular debates – but also through ways in which a new idea of newsrooms as agents of civic activism gained force. The campaigns and petitions at the city level were firmly anchored to articulating a global-modern class culture with its ideological arsenal of corporate excellence, a decadent state and an aspirational middle class. Among other things, these campaigns involved middle-class readers in civic activism, and activated neighbourhood associations by encouraging new forms of citizen vigilantism. All the while, the print media assiduously tried to circumvent the limitations of a monological medium, by offering news not as much as just-in-time information, but as embodied urban subjectivity with no burden of truth claims.
With the expansion of television media, the pressure of “digital interactivity” grew phenomenally. Television channels spared no time in involving the viewers in their daily cycles of news creation. The idea of “citizen journalists” took root precisely in this intra-institutional context, together with its troubling consequences of appropriating informal and precarious immaterial labour for corporate gains (Ross 2009), and its equally troubling neo-liberal politics. In a profound sense, the city-level campaigns by the English media became prototypes for the nationwide anti-corruption and Aam Aadmi movements, with the celebration of citizen journalism by tele­vision channels ensuring a steady flow of performative resources for anyone who claimed stake in “New India”. These forms are distinct from a more top-down crusader model pursued by The Indian Express and other papers in the past, and even more distant from the media-led popular politics of “screen gods” such as N T Rama Rao (NTR) and M G Ramachandran (MGR) in south India.
While the neo-liberal politics underlying the emergence of AAP and city-level anti-corruption movements has to be considered seriously, the activisms should by no means be brushed aside by this very token. It would be simplistic to assume that anti-corruption is just a ploy of an ambitious, yet vulnerable media, or worse still, a handiwork of a totalising neo-liberal capital logic. For one, the energies of the movements and the enthusiasm with which people voted for the party signal the effects of “corruption” as a symbol in popular imagination, which has become even more compelling with massive scandals breaking out back-to-back. Moreover, the media scene itself is shifting with the expanding social media emerging as a new force, and potentially, a powerful, if not autonomous, player in the years to come. By their own admission, AAP has hugely benefited from social media – from organising the movement to upholding its mission among the youth.
With 80 million active internet users on personal computers (24% penetration), 39 million internet users on mobile phones (12% penetration) and 57 million on social media (17% penetration), urban India constitutes a growing community of online media users. The real limitation of social media lies in the fact that social media users are also currently the mainstream media’s “monetisable” audience and, hence, the overlaps in political orientations are not a mere coincidence. Yet, social media reflects the growing enthusiasm among the youth to parti­cipate in high politics, with an enterprise spirit that draws inspiration partly from new media-led movements of the Arab Spring. The sense of enterprise emerges from a variety of market-led features inherent in the new media architecture, including net busyness where compulsive clicking becomes a ritual (Udupa 2014). The experiential sense of anonymity on online media and the gamification of network architecture are crucial in shoring up these new entrepreneurial ways of political partici­pation. Several social media users I met in Mumbai and Bangalore declared enthusiastically that they are here to bring a change, which is now possible with new media because it provides a public-like forum, which can circumvent the established structures of political authority as well as the symbolic dominance of mainstream media. It is this sense of enterprise spirit that has brought AAP activists and Modi activists perilously close, at times constituting a significant overlap.
Internet Hindus
“Internet Hindus” or “Cyber Hindus”, the self-styled right-wing Hindu activists, are a highly visible group of social media users in India and in diasporic locations. The allure of anonymity in new media and the promise of trumping organised media’s symbolic power have encouraged a large number of technologically alert Hindutva sympathisers to present themselves as ideological entrepreneurs, taking up right-wing ideology in their own hands. One finds here a deepening of the articulation of Hindutva with the liberalisation discourse of the early 1990s and pitching of Hindutva against secular corruption, after two decades of liberalisation and two continuous regimes of the Indian National Congress Party. This is, in fact, not entirely new or distinct from the strategies of organised Hindutva in India. As van der Veer (1994) and other scholars astutely observe, Hindu nationalist politics has oscillated between ethno-religious nationalism, and socio-economic issues of corruption and economic growth throughout its career in postcolonial India. On social media, both these discourses are brought together, erasing any possible contradiction. The enterprise model, built into the new media architecture, is crucial in pushing these internet Hindus and an avowedly non-ideological brigade of online users fighting the cause of secular corruption. Internet Hindus imagine themselves as heroic warriors fighting the ideological battle on their own terms, and upon their own will.
It is this articulated conjunction between corruption, neo-liberal subjecti­vity and enterprise politics that gives reason for caution. No doubt, AAP captured the sentiments well and beyond the cherished upwardly mobile middle class, reflecting the frustrations of the poorer class groups, who are equally strongly affected by and angry about governmental corruption. In many ways, AAP represents an instance where the disjunction between what I have argued as mediated “desire” – to clean up cities and politics with a new middle-class agency – and structured visibilities, i e, the politics of publicity charged by proliferating media for multiple publics (Udupa 2012), remains not just as a tension between disconnected mediations, but becomes deeply co-constitutive. Even social media consensus over corruption appears to have come under strain with growing bickering between AAP “camps” and the Hindutva army on Twitter and Facebook. New media is also expanding ­beyond the middle classes with smart phones penetrating many different corners of the country.
Conclusions
All these appear to be encouraging signs, but the excessive reliance of AAP on media could mean that the AAP leaders should constantly confront the challenge of being important for corporate media, which finds new ways to reaffirm the corruption discourse in its original conception of pro-privatisation politics. One can cite a number of television interviews or newspaper columns to support this scepticism, but what strikes as an exemplary case is a recent television discussion when a well-known news anchor anxiously grilled a victorious AAP candidate as to whether they would take Delhi back to the licence raj and cast a spell of doom over all efforts at privatisation. The AAP leader had to reassure that they are indeed not anti-business.
The recent debates on AAP’s anarchist tendencies and a sudden eruption of negative reports on AAP in the mainstream English media are indicative of media’s alarm against activism going out of hand. For the media taken as a whole, this might also signal Nick Couldry’s sobering caution that the possibilities for “transformative political action are weighted towards short-term disruptive interventions and away from long-term positive projections” (2012: 125). This sobering note remains valid despite the media’s euphoric imagination of New India.
Just as our analysis cannot rely on the left utopias, one might also recognise that it is not possible to rely on a politics that promises the utopia of clean governance, which is, in its mediatised form, a pro-business argument. It is then even more important to bring to constant public scrutiny the “hidd

Jan Lokpal: The way out
Arvind Kejriwal may well be looking for political martyrdom. One way is to blame Congress for blocking the Jan Lokpal. He can go through the process and let the home ministry reject his proposal. Or he can try and hold a Jan Lokpal mela (masquerading as the Delhi assembly) and pass the Jan Lokpal Bill which the lieutenant governor will predictably refuse to sign. The crisis he is looking for will emerge. The game, kaun banega vote-pati, will begin.

Legal experts have lined up on both sides. On February 3, Kejriwal decided to bypass the lieutenant governor and the home ministry as required by law. BJP says it was not given a copy of the Bill. Congress says the procedure and Bill are unconstitutional. Both Congress and BJP want the Bill passed in the assembly not at the Ramlila Ground.

Solicitor general Mohan Parasaran told the lieutenant governor that routing the Bill through the Centre is mandatory — more so, because the Bill before Parliament overlaps with the Jan Lokpal Bill. Two out of four legal experts (K N Bhatt and Pinaki Mishra) said no specific opinion on this was sought from them. Justice Mudgal, allegedly consulted, expressed dismay at Kejriwal's language for the lieutenant governor.

We are not quite sure what P V Kapur (not known for constitutional expertise) said. Trotting, if not galloping to the issue, former attorney general Soli Sorabji says the rule requiring reference to the home ministry is unconstitutional — even though not declared as such; and presumably to be followed till then.

Kejriwal's colleague Prashant Bhushan accepts there are two views, and the Bill can be approved by the president later. His take was full statehood for Delhi which is quite another matter. The result: total legal confusion. If smart lawyers are asked how much is 2+2, they reply: "How much do you want it to be?"

The Centre's Lokpal and Lokayukta Act (LLA) was delayed on the federal ground that Parliament could not legislate Lokayuktas for the states since Section 63 of LLA does not prevent "state legislatures" from establishing a Lokayukta "if not so established". Delhi does not have to comply with Section 63, first because it is not a state and secondly, it already has a Lokpal of which the flamboyant Manmohan Sarin was Lokayukta.

Suppose Kejriwal puts the new Jan Lokpal Bill in the form of amendments to Delhi's existingLokayukta Act of 1996, would such an amendment Bill pass muster? I think it strains credulity for the Centre to play the Section 63 LLA card.

Any limitations on the Delhi legislature passing the Jan Lokpal Bill arise from the Constitution's Article 239A, constituting the National Capital Territory. Delhi cannot pass legislation on public order, police and land and some special higher education matters. Parliament can legislate on all matters if Delhi's competent laws are contrary to Parliament's laws. The latter will prevail unless the president says that Delhi's law shall prevail.

It is clear that no prior clearance is required for Delhi making law on any area included in its legislative competence. However, to the extent to which the Jan Lokpal Bill seeks to include the DDA and Delhi Police within its ambit, that is beyond the Delhi assembly's constitutional competence.

A special procedure requiring the lieutenant governor's consent arises under the NCT Act of 1991 with respect to expenditure from the consolidated fund [Section 22 (3)]. In this context, the lieutenant governor means the home ministry. Arguably, the Jan Lokpal will be a charge on the consolidated fund.

Delhi already has a Lokayukta and Uplokayukta Act, 1996, which states that all expenses and salaries are charged on the consolidated fund of Delhi [Section 5 (9)]. If this is the case, and Kejriwal presents his Jan Lokpal Bill under the existing Delhi Act of 1996, it would be stretching a point to say that each amendment has to be cleared by the president. Transaction Rule 55 does not bind the legislature.

Kejriwal loves theatre and maybe planning a resignation forced upon him by the forces of political 'evil'. His colleague Yogendra Yadav advises him to slow down. His lawyer, Bhushan, interprets the law bifocally. Kejriwal should pursue the following steps: first, abandon the drama of enacting the Bill at the Ramlila Ground. Second, he should present the Jan Lokpal Bill as an amendment to the existing Delhi Lokayukta Act of 1996, thus obviating the consolidated fund controversy. Third, he should remove DDA and Delhi Police from the Jan Lokpal Bill and proceed to pass it. Fourth, he should include the DDA and police provisions later after examining the assembly's competence to do so.

Drama has overtaken Kejriwal. He is a vote catcher with a vote bank. Maybe he doesn't want to stay on as chief minister and is looking for the excuse to pack it up. But our Constitution and governance run on two axes: democracy and rule of law. Absence of either leads to autocracy. Kejriwal owes more to his electorate than threats and tantrums.

The responsible question is: Who will rule well? Not, who will rule to catch votes?
To be a national alternative, AAP must focus on issues of economy and governance

 Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal appears to be relentless in his fight against corruption. He has promised to put up candidates against 30 powerful politicians - who the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has dubbed corrupt - for forthcoming parliamentary elections. If AAP follows through on this promise it will be a novel tactic in political activism, addressing a middle class complaint that there are no clean candidates to vote for in elections. The best and most lasting cure for corruption would be if politicians know they can be voted out for corruption. 

AAP needs to take care, however, that it doesn't become a one-trick pony by making corruption its sole agenda. Since it's putting up candidates across the country, it needs to have a national agenda that goes beyond corruption and addresses other critical issues of governance. On this front, it has hardly covered itself with glory after assuming charge in Delhi. 

People are struggling with inflation, unemployment and slow growth across the country, and AAP needs to stake out a position on these issues. Its overturning of the previous Delhi government's belated decision to permit foreign direct investment in retail doesn't augur well in this regard. AAP's stand goes against employment generation which urban youth desperately seeks, as well as inflation busting which would benefit all of aam admi. If AAP grinds down the economy, no amount of corruption targeting is going to avail it in people's eyes. 

The same consideration applies to law and order. Serious charges have been levelled against law minister Somnath Bharti of leading an unruly mob which assaulted African women. The signals sent by that incident seem to have triggered a bevy of hate crimes in Delhi. A 19-year-old teenager from Arunachal Pradesh was assaulted in a crowded public market and later died. This was followed by goons thrashing two Manipuri women in full public view. Aam admi rule must not mean pandering to the worst community prejudices. The AAP government must declare zero tolerance for racial hatred and ensure that culprits are brought to book. If it can't manage even its own backyard, its national ambitions are bound to take a hit. It can start the house cleaning process by asking Bharti, who has made a mess of his job so far, to quit.
What AAP should know
"We don't know if being black is a crime" was the poignant comment by a Ugandan woman recently subjected to Aam Aadmi Party-led mob harassment. But it is not ethnicity or nationality that is at the heart of the matter, it is the average Indian's age-old preference for lighter skin. If AAP's Kumar Vishwas famously called Kerala nurses "kaalipillee" even average Indians often refer to Africans as kalua or kaalu. 

Implicit in that appellation is a sense of superiority at being fairer. Well, i have bad news for superior-feeling Indians. Under our brown skins we are all blacks. Nor just us Indians, but all of humanity. Genetic science has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that all humans — to be precise homo sapiens — owe their origins to Africans. 

A simple way of finding out who you really are under the skin or under your blond or auburn hair is to send a swab from your cheek to a lab for testing. I did it. I sent a sample of my DNA to the National Genographic Project, a collaboration between National Geographic Society and IBM to map the journey of human genome. The vial i sent did not have my name or any information other than the serial number that came with the vial in the mail. 

A few weeks later i checked the results of the test on the web by typing in the serial number and was surprised by what it said. They said i was Indian because my DNA marker of M52 — was an unmistakably Indian marker. What is more amazing though is that by digging deep into my DNA they found that my ancestors came from East Africa some 40,000 years ago. The earliest DNA marker i carry is the Y-chromosome marker M168, which is the marker for the earliest common ancestor of every non-African male person living today. 

My ancestors, progenies of an African father, at one stage started walking out of the area they lived in, possibly in search of food and better living. That journey was carried out by successive generations ultimately leading them out of Africa and into other continents. The route my ancestors took in their thousands of years journey to reach India is etched, incredible as it may sound, in my DNA. 

My DNA shows the marker M89 associated with the population living in the Middle East, Jordan Valley. The other marker that follows M89 is the marker associated with today's Iran — M201. The ancestral journey which began in Africa ended in India. This DNA trail is similar to our passport with the visas of various places we have travelled to. 

The inevitable question is, how come so many of the present-day non-Africans look so different? Like detectives, scientists have figured the reasons behind the amazing diversity among what can be called an African diaspora. Exposed as they were to a great variety of environments — from extremely hot to extremely cold, dry to humid over the millennia their body shapes, skin colours and everything that now identifies someone as African or Caucasian or Mongoloid was transformed. 

Extra doses of melanin make the skin black and also protect it from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. As the skin also needs sunlight to make vitamin D people in northern Europe lost melanin to open the skin pores to sunlight (hence their fairer complexion). The African diaspora that ended up settling in India travelled through different routes undergoing various transformations under the impact of different environments. But that does not alter the fact that 99% of all our DNA is exactly the same as that of our common African parents. 

As the Ugandan woman put it, we may be black or white but our blood is red. What she did not say is that the blood is all African.

Story of an end foretold

Sometimes, the end is foretold at the beginning. Arvind Kejriwal was quite reluctant to assume office as Chief Minister of Delhi, and the lack of a majority of its own for his Aam Aadmi Party seemed only part of the reason. The crusader against corruption did not want anything to do with the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party; it was almost as if he were afraid of being tainted by mere association with them. From the time he was sworn in, he was keener on projecting his party as a serious national-level alternative to the two principal national parties than on governing Delhi. Delhi was a stage for his theatrics, a campaign platform before the Lok Sabha election. The thrust was on politically exposing the Congress and the BJP, and not on solving the small, everyday problems of Delhi. Mr. Kejriwal obviously wanted to demonstrate what he would not be allowed to do as Chief Minister, and not what he could do as head of the government. Given the paucity of time before the parliamentary election, he must have thought it safer to approach the people as the leader of a party whose government was thwarted by political rivals than as a Chief Minister who was unable to deliver on his promises. Thus, the Jan Lokpal Bill was seen as the ideal issue over which to create circumstances for his own exit. Having built a political party of a movement that had the Jan Lokpal Bill as its rallying point, the AAP convener believed he would find popular support for staking all on the Bill. But the manner in which his government manoeuvred the Bill appeared to be aimed at inviting opposition rather than at seeing it passed in the Assembly. An honest attempt could have been made to follow constitutional procedures in pushing through the Bill, making it politically difficult for the AAP’s rivals to oppose it. The all-or-nothing attitude Mr. Kejriwal adopts on every issue can do little to further his party’s agenda of change.
If Mr. Kejriwal achieved anything at all in the Jan Lokpal fiasco, it was in tarring the Congress and the BJP with the same broad brush. For good measure, he brought in a new factor: their supposed support for the Reliance Industries head, Mukesh Ambani. The linking of the opposition to the Bill to the First Information Report lodged against Mr. Ambani on the gas pricing controversy seems a stretch, but Mr. Kejriwal was looking for a conspiracy that could tie the Congress and the BJP together. By turning the movement against corruption into a political party, Mr. Kejriwal took the first step in trying to change the system from the inside. But when he was expected to take the next step as the head of a government — even if it be of a minority government with uncertain support — he fell short.

Durbar lessons from Patna: Kejriwal's government should learn from other states' experiments
On January 11, a cold Saturday morning, thousands of people gathered for the Janata Durbar convened by Delhi's new CM Arvind Kejriwal. His intent was undoubtedly sincere. There is reason today for governance to become more egalitarian and accessible to the common man. However, the well-intentioned first step became an unmitigated fiasco. A virtual stampede ensued. For his own safety, the CM quickly left the venue. We are now told there will be no more Janata Durbars.

What Kejriwal was attempting to do is not new. Many states have experimented with the instrumentality of direct contact with the common man, with varying degrees of success. Oomen Chandy`s mass contact programme in Kerala has been lauded by several impartial agencies. Other CMs have set up efficient systems of connectivity through mobiles and online access. A remarkable experiment about which many people outside the state may not be fully aware has also been underway, almost without a single break, in Bihar.

Since 2005, when he came to power, Nitish Kumar has been holding every Monday a `janata ke durbar mein mukhya mantri` programme. The title of the forum, consciously given, is important. A durbar connotes the grandeur of a feudal court. Butif the authorities are put in the durbar of the common man, the context changes, both substantively and symbolically.

From fledgling beginnings, the system has been upgraded and refined over the years. Purely from the point of view of learning from different experiences and beyond competitive one-upmanship, it may be useful to know how this durbar has been conducted almost without a break for eight years.

First, the miscellaneous approach was done away with. Each Monday has a pre-identified, specific area of grievance redressal. This allocation is by now well-known across the state, but is still widely advertised on the preceding Friday. Cases of law and order and land disputes are taken up on the first Monday of a month. Education, health and welfare — including specifically for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, extremely backward classes and minorities — are dealt with the next Monday. The third Monday is for issues relating broadly to roads, power and water. The fourth Monday is for party workers and if a month has a fifth Monday it is used to hold an Udyami Panchayat for the industrial sector.

Secondly, there is a rigorous system of registration, follow-up and monitoring. Each person who attends is given a unique identity number (UIN) in the form of a green card. This is simultaneously scanned and uploaded on the registration computer. After the petitioner meets the CM, his plaint and the UIN are uploaded on the computer in the CM`s personal office.

All ministers pertaining to the concerned subject are present as are their principal secretaries and department heads. On an intercom system at the site, the CM often gives instructions or speaks to his ministers before directing the petitioner to meet with them. If the issue is not immediately resolved, the plaint is uploaded on a computer at the departmental level for further action.

After the durbar, the CM`s office prepares a collated chart and forwards the complaints to concerned departments in both soft and hard versions. An action-taken report is required within a fixed time period. An IT team in his office monitors disposal. A senior official, designated secretary (public grievances), oversees the operation. The disposal rate is as high as 95%. Applicants can enquire about their cases through a telephone number which is efficiently manned. Similar durbars are replicated each Monday at the district and block levels.

Thirdly, organising the event is rigorous. A covered pandal has been permanently set up next to the CM`s office with queue markers for the 600-700 people who attend on an average. Tea and biscuits are served to each person in summer and a drink made from sattu in winter. There are separate enclosures for women and for the physically challenged where the CM goes himself to meet people. Toilet facilities are also provided.

A medical team is at hand for any contingencies. If a person mistakenly comes with a grievance not related to the subject of that Monday, he/she is still entertained. Those needing to come for a second time for the same grievance — not more than 2% on average — are handled separately, seated in a separate enclosure and given a blue UIN card. The behaviour of the petitioners is generally not controlled. Administrative authorities have been instructed that they must patiently listen to the aam admi. The CM is present throughout, mostly till late in the evening.

AAP by definition purports to be the party of the common man. However, between its noble intent and the desired result, between promise and delivery, there is the critical shadow of rigorous planning and organisation. Perhaps AAP can benefit from the silent revolution unfolding every Monday in Patna.

The importance of being dull

AAP has shown a penchant for the spectacular. Why that is not going to be enough.
The Aam Aadmi Party is gone as a party of government, at least for now. It mounted an astonishing electoral insurgency, and swung the doors of power open without having political lineage or the financial backing of business, the two standard features of contemporary political parties in India.
It did not organise a caste-based, religious or regional mobilisation, the other typical characteristics of Indian politics. Demonstrating how new political formations can emerge against all odds when the existing political parties generate citizen apathy or disgust, it also illustrated that democracies can have self-correcting mechanisms.
Nonetheless, a 49-day wonder is over. What does the AAP’s fall show? What does the future hold?
The AAP’s brief governing career illustrates, most of all, a well-known political truth. When those attacking the system come to power, they find it hard to govern. Insurgents tend to be terrible governors. Anti-system parties, a term coined by political scientist Giovanni Sartori, are good at undermining the system, not at running it.
The AAP is, of course, not the kind of anti-system party that totalitarian parties or the communist parties in Europe during the two world wars were. It is committed neither to violence, nor to an overthrow of the Constitution. But it does wish to overturn the way politics is done. It loves India, but dislikes India’s polity.
By definition, an elected government must function within the existing framework of rules and laws. If those rules and laws are disagreeable, the government can change them. But fundamental, as opposed to marginal, change cannot be brought about by decree or in haste. Patient communication, meticulous negotiation and careful alliance building are necessary.
The initial challenge of insurgents in government is always the same: they must first follow the rules in order to change them. A chief minister sleeping on the sidewalk in protest, wrapped in a quilt on a cold winter night, may satisfy the inner moral urge of the insurgent, but governance is not a branch of ethics. Without an ethical core, politics does lose its shine, but with ethics alone, no polity has ever been run.
Consider three other errors of the AAP’s excessive moralism.
First, should a law minister encourage vigilantism, however much he suspects the police of being corrupt? Unauthorised nightly raids can’t reform the police. Police reform is a dull, prosaic business, not a site of dramatic, guerilla-like forays. Similarly, racial remarks don’t accord with modern law, which seeks to establish individual, not collective, guilt. It is not enough to say that vigilantism or racism was not intended.
Hamaari niyat to saaf thi, logon ko gussa aa gayaa (our intentions were pure, the people got angry) — this is an empirically inadmissible theory and a terrible excuse. Crowds gathering around crusading ministers, attacking the police, tend to be nasty, brutish and furious. They can’t easily be controlled. Even Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest mobiliser of the masses in the last century, perhaps longer, found it difficult to discipline the masses entirely. A paradox always marks the transition from insurgency to governance: without mass politics, movements can’t be built, but with a release of mass furies, governments can’t be run.
Second, should a government unilaterally lower electricity tariffs, charging power companies with padding costs, unless a rule-governed audit has established cost inflation beyond doubt? Private companies may well be venal, but how to calculate the costs of production is a complex economic matter. In my first book, I tried to calculate the costs of wheat and rice production, presumably a much simpler matter than the costs of power production. It became a forbidding enterprise. The complexity of the calculation was brought home, deflating earlier, and simplistic, statistical enthusiasm. The implication ought to be obvious. A careful audit should first be ordered and then the price lowered, if costs were indeed inflated, not the other way round.
Third, should a government issue an FIR for corruption in a business dispute, which is already under investigation in a court of law? Doing so is a truly odd governance principle, for it disrespects the judicial process. It demonstrates a penchant for the dramatic and the spectacular, not for the often dull and painstaking art of governance. The AAP’s election manifesto had talked about the necessity of “udyog anukool neetiyaan (business-friendly policies)”. In the 49 days of governance, we saw an incessant lashing out against business, not business-friendly, investment-attracting economic announcements. To be sure, governance requires attacking corruption, but it also calls for sensitivity towards the avenues of economic growth. The AAP in power went for the former with extraordinary fury; the latter did not even get a chance.
Finally, consider the AAP’s critique of representative democracy. That Indian democracy functions well at the time of elections, but between elections governments become insensitive to the people is now a well-known argument. The AAP has rightly tapped into this democracy deficit, promising to bring governance closer to the people. But is it making a necessary distinction between popular will and popular sentiment? The concept of popular will, a sine qua non of democracy, has an irreducible element of deliberation and judgement. It is not equal to the popular sentiment of the day, which can quickly change. If democratic legislation based on popular will is to have any meaning, it must embrace the idea of people’s representatives deliberating, debating and concluding. If representative assemblies are not working well, one has to think about how to reform them. But democratic decision-making simply can’t be handed over to people’s assemblies, hastily put together in parks, maidans and stadiums. Mohalla sabhas are fine as deliberative spaces, but weekly janta darbars, luckily dropped, and state assemblies meeting in stadiums in full public view, luckily not allowed, are not. Popular furies do not amount to well-thought-out judgements. Emotions and biases do not add up to rationality.
Can the AAP make a comeback? Yes, it can. Troubled by its agitational ways, a section of the urban middle class, certainly its upper segment, is likely to leave the AAP. But its dramatic mode of governance is also likely to increase its appeal to the urban poor and lower middle class. These classes harbour similar anger against the existing system. Moreover, since television now reaches over 800 million people in India, the urban-rural voter dichotomy is not likely to hold up as neatly as it did in the past. The AAP’s theatrical style, best symbolised by the chief minister sleeping on the sidewalk and the law minister challenging the police, is almost certain to appeal to the rural electorate close to Delhi.
The gain at the lower end of the social spectrum is likely to be bigger than the loss at the upper end. As a consequence, the AAP’s performance in Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, western Uttar Pradesh and some of the bigger cities of India may well be substantial in the next elections. The AAP is here to stay. Delhi was one part of a long and evolving political story.
But even if the AAP does come to power, let us say in Haryana or in Delhi again, the same cycle of electoral exhilaration and governmental emaciation may haunt the party. How to combine an anti-system impulse with governance will remain the AAP’s fundamental political dilemma. It might want to study how the provincial Congress governments of 1937 functioned in British
India, or how the Left Front governments evolved in Kerala and West Bengal after they first came to power.

Where Does the Aam Aadmi Party Stand?

The most striking feature of the poll scene, as it is now, is the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Its emergence has a lot in common with the Janata Party’s arrival in 1977. There are differences too. Unlike on 30 January 1977, the day when a cross-section of leaders with their own baggage rallied behind Jaya­prakash Narayan (JP) to announce the formation of the Janata Party and put up candidates against Indira Gandhi’s Congress for the general election scheduled just a month from then, the AAP has been in existence for more than a year and its leaders are not shy of pleading guilty when charged with being anarchists. JP, on the contrary, was a reluctant entrant to the field of electoral politics, and did so only to counter such a notion about him.
This distinction apart, the AAP has a lot in common with the Janata experiment, and it is important that its leaders ponder this seriously and commit themselves to making the necessary course corrections. In other words, they owe it to the people of this country to learn from the Janata experiment and commit themselves to not repeating its mistakes. One of such commonalities is Kumar Vishwas; one cannot but see him as another Raj Narain in the making. Apart from that he carries baggage (including praising Narendra Modi), his decision to take on Rahul Gandhi is strikingly similar to Narain taking a vow to remain unshaven until he defeated Indira Gandhi in her constituency; somewhat drawn from Draupadi’s vow in the Mahabharata.
Narain achieved that and shaved off his flowing beard. But he was soon o­bsessed with another idea – undoing the Janata Party. He achieved that too. His contribution was immense even if we a­rgue that the Janata Party would have collapsed anyway. Given the paucity of time (between Morarji Desai’s release from prison on 18 January 1977 and the election in just about a month’s time), it was necessary for an amorphous bunch of leaders to put up a common platform, and they ranged from across the ideologically driven Bharatiya Jan Sangh and Socialist Party to the Congress ­(Organisation), which was hardly guided by any ideology. It was known, at least to JP, that these leaders had spent more time fighting among themselves than trying to achieve any constructive political unity; he thought it possible to bring ideology to the fore ­after the ­battle.
Without Ideological Coherence
The Janata Party would not have taken shape if JP had stressed the need for ideological coherence. And, with the benefit of hindsight, one would hold that as proper in the condition that India was then. Any insistence on ideological cohesion would have meant a fractured opposition against Indira Gandhi’s Congress, and the first-past-the-post system would have helped her return to power and claim that the people of India had endorsed putting leaders in jail, killing young men in encounters, rendering the press her handmaiden, and even reducing the Constitution into a plaything of her servile cabinet and Parliament.
The Janata Party crumbled, leading die-hard Congress supporters to mock all future attempts at forging an alternative. This indirectly paved the way for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its revanchist campaign gaining political acceptability. But there is no way that democracy and the republican Constitution of India can be treated the way I­ndira Gandhi did between 25 June 1975 and 21 March 1977. The Constitution (44th Amendment) Act, 1978, made possible because of the Janata Party victory, ensures that no one person at the helm can effect a smooth transition from d­emocracy to dictatorship.
The AAP, incidentally, is distinct from the Janata Party in another way as well. The Janata Party, right from its formation, had too many leaders and most of them were committed to distinct ideo­logies. Modi, incidentally, was one of the young forces behind the party as much as Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav were. And they came to be led by Desai who was known to have resisted any ideological commitment, and had no large following across the country. When push came to shove, Desai became a captive of the Jan Sangh faction in the Janata Party, and thus came his fall.
It may be true that Arvind Kejriwal is no pushover. He has emerged as the undisputed “leader” of the AAP. But the party and its leader have also shown a tendency to walk into a political discourse that the Congress adapted itself to in the past and the BJP as well after the 1990s. Kejriwal’s personality is now larger than the party and such symbolism as his decision to take on Modi at Varanasi may be of some appeal. But then, there is a cause for concern if looked at from the point of view of the necessary role that ideology must play in a democratic discourse that rests on the party system. In the party-based democracy that we are, it is necessary that the AAP states clearly where it stands on issues.
This certainly has not been the case with the party. And if one is to consider the party a serious contender for power (I will refrain from doing so and refuse to give it an outside chance to form the next government, notwithstanding the groundswell of support it has across the country), it is imperative that it address the question of ideology. The AAP’s leaders are free to declare that the party stands for the economic policy resolution endorsed by the Lok Sabha in July 1991, and that the trouble is with the way it was implemented in the next couple of decades. Kejriwal said as much when he addressed representatives of i­ndustry earlier this year and pointed out that his problem was with the cronyism that has marked the implementation of m­arket reforms.
In that event, and presuming that this will remain the AAP’s ideological position vis-à-vis the economic policy, critics can wonder if capitalism has at all been guided only by the market; or point out that history proves that capitalism, from the time of primitive accumulation, has depended on the state to establish itself, grow and prosper; or that free trade has only been a slogan and that trade or merchant capitalism was born out of legislations by the state and prospered that way. If Kejriwal’s statement that he is o­pposed to cronyism and not capitalism as such is to be taken as the AAP’s position, it leads to the view that here is someone who promises to deliver things better than Modi. Thus the battle in Varanasi can be seen as between two men who want to implement rapid industrial growth, with the difference between them being that one would do it purely the market way while accusing the other of developing crony capitalism.
One will then want to ask if Medha Patkar, the AAP’s candidate in Mumbai, represents the party at all. In all fairness, she holds a view that is not just o­pposition to cronyism and support of capitalism. Patkar certainly is closer to the view that capitalism or industrial capitalism is inimical to the interests of the poor and the oppressed, and close to Prashant Bhushan’s views on a variety of issues, including the conflict in the Kashmir Valley and on the use of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in the north-eastern states. One presumes that Vishwas holds views that are distinct from any of these. One is also certain that Sarah Joseph, the AAP’s candidate in Thrissur in Kerala, will virulently disagree with Yogendra Yadav’s (AAP’s candidate from Gurgaon) approach to khap panchayats.
Eclecticism
The issue is not about the AAP forming the next government. It need not necessarily happen this time. It is not a crime for a group to remain eclectic. Eclecticism, in some instances, is bliss, and when an eclectic group gets to the public domain, it can help others reach clarity on a variety of issues where things are not just black and white. The economic policy of 1991, for instance, begs a response that is not just acceptance or summary rejection. This, however, is not the same as imagining that the policies can be implemented without cronyism. In the same way, one may debate the issue of big dams and seek to arrive at a rational position. But to imagine that the constitutional goal of social, economic, and political justice can be achieved without reservations for the backward classes, as Kejriwal has held at times, cannot appeal to those with a sense of history.
It is not necessary that the AAP hurry up to state its position on such issues right away. It can afford to wait, simply because it is not going to be handed power in May 2014. However, it is necessary that the party commit, in the public d­omain, that it will work in real earnest after May 2014 to locate itself in the demo­cratic and republican space, and thus ensure that it will not end the way the J­anata Party did in 1979. The AAP is based on an idea that cries to be nurtured into an ideology. While there is no urgency to doing this, it cannot be wished away, as a section seems to want to.

The Delhi dilemma

By leaving it to the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi to decide whether to recommend dissolution of the Delhi Assembly or not, the Supreme Court has wisely refrained from giving any direction to the constitutional authority to follow a particular course of action. What the Court has done instead is to clarify the position concerning the power of the President to rescind or modify his February 16, 2014 Proclamation imposing President’s Rule in Delhi. There is “no fetter or impediment” to the President exercising his power to revoke or vary his earlier order. When the Aam Aadmi Party government resigned in February, the Lt. Governor did not accept the outgoing regime’s recommendation to dissolve the House. Instead, the Assembly was kept under suspended animation. This was rightly done, as the Supreme Court, in S.R. Bommai vs. Union of India , had ruled that the legislature could be dissolved only after the Proclamation imposing President’s Rule receives the approval of both Houses of Parliament. In the case of Delhi, both Houses have approved the Proclamation, but the Assembly continues to remain suspended. The AAP has approached the Supreme Court challenging the non-dissolution of the House and seeking fresh elections. While the legal position is clear, that the President’s order is subject to judicial review, if it is found to be mala fide , or based on extraneous or irrelevant considerations, it is difficult to see any scope for a direction to a constitutional authority to dissolve — or refrain from dissolving — the legislature. President’s Rule in Delhi cannot go on beyond a year, unless extended with Parliament's approval.
While the AAP alleges that the Assembly has been kept under suspended animation with the mala fide motive of delaying fresh elections, the government has defended its decision not to dissolve the House. The government’s position is that it would not be expedient or in the public interest to hold another election so soon after the last Assembly election held in December 2013. The absence of a representative government is a real concern. And it is an issue that requires a political solution. The possibility of forming another government out of the present composition of the Delhi Assembly, in which the two top parties are short of a majority, is limited. A fresh election is the obvious way out of the present impasse, but none can guarantee a decisive verdict with any one party winning a majority. In the case of a hopelessly fractured verdict, the only option will be for parties to work together for a reasonable period of time so that repeated, frequent polls are avoided. Ultimately, though, it is the responsibility of the electorate to be decisive and put in place a government that would be stable, and responsive to their needs.