The common man breaks new ground

“Corruption has become so blatant, so pathological that those involved don’t even try very hard to hide their tracks.” – Arundhati Roy

He is the new crusader against corruption in India. His press conferences are jam-packed, his exposés make national headlines, politicians and businessmen dread his disclosures. New York Times dubbed him the “bomb thrower”. He is the new agenda-setter, his rapid-fire whistle-blowing tactics have hit the corrupt elite like never before.

Former income tax inspector Arvind Kejriwal, 44, is short and at times appears malnourished. He sports a neatly trimmed moustache, frameless spectacles and loads of attitude. In recent months, Kejriwal has exposed them all — from senior ministers to top politicians, from Fortune 500-listed CEOs to high-profile NGOs. All have been hit where it hurts the most. The ruling elite are in shock and the middle class has erupted in sheer delight at Kejriwal’s naming and shaming of the rich and the powerful.

Until late last year, Kejriwal was a backroom manager of India’s most popular anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare, who rallied Indians in a series of sit-ins to push for a powerful ombudsman who can fight corruption, a cancer that has seeped into every layer of government and public life. Led by a small team of committed activists, including Kejriwal, 75-year-old Kisan Baburao Hazare, or Anna Hazare, rattled the government in nationwide protests and hunger strikes beginning April last year. His movement gathered momentum and gained unprecedented support of poor and middle-class people, who skipped work to hear him slam ministers and politicians.

Hazare’s movement occupied prime-time television and the national narrative for months, forcing the Congress-led government in New Delhi to table a bill for anti-corruption ombudsman, Lokpal. But this Lokpal Bill was rejected by Hazare and his “Team Anna”, who said it was a lame-duck law with little powers and scope to prosecute powerful and wealthy.

Frustrated by the government’s dillydallying, Hazare began a final push for his version of Lokpal Bill and launched an indefinite hunger strike in July at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. The government ignored this round of protest and after ten days of hunger strike, Kejriwal and his team were urged to end the stir and find an alternative to endless protests that mobilised thousands of people but served no real purpose. From this platform, Kejriwal announced his group India Against Corruption will launch a political party to provide a clean alternative to Indians who are fed up with the existing parties.

Kejriwal and his trusted team then broke away from Team Anna and announced a roadmap to launch a political party. Since then, Kejriwal has gone on a marathon name-and-shame campaign. His first big fish was Robert Vadra, powerful Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law. He accused Vadra of making millions through illegal land deals, a charge swiftly denied by his mother-in-law’s party. Vadra, married to a charming Priyanka Gandhi, does not hold any position in Congress but enjoys immense clout. The stunning allegations were backed by documents Kejriwal said prove Vadra’s illegal land deals. It was the first time that someone had pointed fingers at the Gandhi household. The government and Congress denied charges and dismissed demands of an investigation. Also exposed was then minister of law and justice (now foreign minister) Salman Khurshid who Kejriwal said misappropriated funds meant for the physically challenged through a trust run by his wife Louis Khurshid. Another high-profile politician targeted by Kejriwal was Nitin Gadkari, president of opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, who he accused of accepting business favours from the ruling Congress-NCP government in Maharashtra. These allegations made in a press conference and broadcast live on national TV embarrassed the BJP that projected itself as a clean alternative to corruption-ridden Congress.

But the most high-profile businessmen on Kejriwal’s radar were Fortune 500-listed CEOs and brothers Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani. Last month he said India’s most powerful corporation Reliance Industries was arm-twisting the government in an attempt to make billions in natural gas contracts. He also suggested that Mukesh, ranked 19th in the global rich list and head of Reliance, was behind the removal of a Cabinet minister who refused to oblige his company. Soon after this, Kejriwal accused the brothers of stashing illegal cash in the Geneva branch of a well-known international bank.

Popularity and acceptance

Today, Kejriwal’s trademark press conferences provide fodder to a fiercely competitive media and are a source of glee for the middle class that is increasingly getting frustrated by the extent of corruption in public institutions. His every exposé has made newspaper headlines and been debated on prime-time TV watched by millions across the country. In recent months, Kejriwal, who quit a government job to launch his movement, has seen his popularity graph rising steadily.

But why he is so popular and why media attach so much importance to Kejriwal’s utterances? Because, commentators say, people of India are fed up by Congress’s attempts to weaken democratic institutions in recent years. “It started with the emasculation of the prime minister,” columnist Tavleen Singh wrote recently. “After he helped the United Progressive Alliance win re-election in 2009, he was allowed to take charge and appoint a Cabinet but it soon became clear that he could not appoint a minister or sack one without Sonia Gandhi’s approval. She then proceeded to give so much power to her National Advisory Council that the Cabinet became a subsidiary. The executive wing of government was reduced to a caricature.”

She feels people’s anger is not limited to the Congress, though: “The damage to Parliament has been more insidious and has been accomplished with the participation of every political party. Hereditary democracy is the main cause of the damage. It is an idea that originated from the Congress Party but is now the norm, so Parliament, and state legislative assemblies, have become private clubs into which ordinary Indians are denied entry. This is the real cause of the rage we see in middle-class Indians who believe they have been totally excluded from the political process. When Arvind Kejriwal says that political leaders across party lines are hand in glove in subverting the system, he is not wrong.”

Another reason for Kejriwal’s popularity is his seemingly clean past. In 2006, Kejriwal won the Ramon Magsaysay award for Emergent Leadership, regarded as Asia’s Nobel prize. Born in 1968 to working-class parents, Kejriwal studied mechanical engineering from the country’s top Indian Institute of Technology. He spent years working with the Tatas and India’s notoriously corrupt Income Tax Department before quitting in disgust.

But others attribute his success to Kejriwal’s guts in breaching a psychological barrier that provided immunity to the corrupt. “… it would appear a crucial silence has been broken,” wrote Shoma Chaudhury, investigative magazine Tehelka’s managing editor. “Indian media and politicians have always had some inexplicable no-go areas, islands of immunity no one questioned out of a strange mix of tribal propriety, vested interests and fear. With Arvind Kejriwal’s high-visibility fusillade against Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra, that moat was decisively breached. Since then, rolling one upon the other, several other politicians have come under fire ...”

Chaudhury believes Kejriwal’s campaign will encourage others to expose the rot: “In every way, this breached moat can only be a good thing. It signals that something is shifting in Indian democracy. It will embolden others to speak up. The scrutiny will deepen. The old ways can no longer hold good. The rot in India’s systems has become so gargantuan, it has to rebuild or it will implode.”

“With each exposé — differing as they may be in scale, vehemence and diligence — crucial concepts that had all but disappeared from India’s public lexicon are being forced back on the table; not just rank corruption, but ideas of conflict of interest; misuse of office; the political-corporate nexus; cross-party collusion; and the simple idea that those who wield great power must also live by the rules,” she added.

Kejriwal’s public disclosures are also remarkable in the sense that they demystify and decode corruption into a simple language that the common man understands. When Kejriwal exposed Ambani’s arm-twisting tactics in complex natural gas contracts, he did so with a poser to the people of India: “Are you ready to pay more for electricity because a businessman wants to jack up the selling price of natural gas?” And when he talked about Vadra’s illegal land deals, he pointed out that land prices went up disproportionately in Haryana state where Gandhi’s son-in-law used his influence to get approval for a housing project on the land he bought at throwaway prices from farmers. Later in Gadkari’s case, he raised a question that challenged the very foundation of India democracy: Of him taking favours from the ruling Congress, thereby mortgaging people’s faith entrusted on him as the head of the nation’s principal opposition Bharatiya Janta Party.

Challenges ahead

Four months after parting ways with Hazare , Kejriwal, on November 24, announced the name of his new political outfit Aam Admi Party, or the common man’s party. “They are not politicians. They are fed up of politicians. They are the people who are fed up of corruption and price rise. This is why the common man has decided to challenge them. Now the common man will sit in Parliament,” he said of activists associated with his movement. “The party’s vision is Swaraj. People should get the ‘raj’. That vision will be finalised. Twenty-five to thirty issues will be discussed ... which all issues need to be taken first by the party. Committees will be formed. They will make drafts in four to five months. There will discussions through the country.”

In a guarded reaction, Congress leader Digvijay Singh told Weekend Review: “We are very happy Kejriwal has formed a political party. We wish him well.” He declined a comment on the name of Kejriwal’s party that sounds similar to a popular Congress slogan. But he told reporters that the move “reflects intellectual bankruptcy of Kejriwal”.

Kejriwal’s party will make election debut in 2013 when Delhi goes to polls. Contesting elections is different from running a hit-and-run outfit to carry out ambush operations, a point Kejriwal’s mentor Hazare had raised when the two had parted ways over the former’s decision to launch a political party. To be able to fight elections, his party must build a vast network of committed cadre, raise funds and find honest people to stand in polls. This is not an easy task, considering the sheer enormity and complex nature of the exercise.

Political observers and commentators have begun to point out deficiencies in his name-and-shame campaign. “What is not right is the manner in which he and his comrades have justified the lynch mob as a solution to our political problems,” columnist Singh argued. “And just as we are paying the price for the weakening of democratic institutions, we will soon start paying the price for Kejriwal’s brand of politics. It is beyond ludicrous to believe, as his ‘vision document’ suggests, that laws and economic decisions that affect the whole country should be left in the hands of ‘local communities’.”

She wrote: “The role of elected legislatures in democratic countries is that they become the buffer between democracy and mob rule. But, Kejriwal and his high-minded colleagues appear not to have noticed this. What they recommend, perhaps unknowingly, is mobocracy. What is nearly as worrying is that their ‘vision’ for India’s future is devoid of a single new political or economic idea.”

Another worrying fact is that Kejriwal may overwhelm people with a plethora of corruption cases. “The good thing about it is that it gives us an insight into how the networks of power connect and interlock. The worrying thing is that each scam pushes the last one out of the way, and life goes on. If all we will get out of it is an extra-acrimonious election campaign, it can only raise the bar of what our rulers know we can tolerate, or be conned into tolerating,” celebrated author Arundhati Roy says, adding that, “…these exposes are strategic leaks from politicians and business houses who are spilling the beans on each other, hoping to get ahead of their rivals. Sometimes it’s across party lines, sometimes it’s intra-party jockeying. It’s being done brilliantly, and those who are being used as clearing houses to front these campaigns may not always be aware that this is the case.”

Also, all the allegations made by Kejriwal have remained just that. His disclosures were followed by swift denials and in some cases Kejriwal’s targets have been rewarded after he exposed them.

In a recent interview to Outlook magazine, Roy came down heavy on Kejriwal’s idea of anti-corruption ombudsman: “Setting up a parallel government with tens of thousands of police and bureaucrats, which is what the Jan Lokpal Bill envisages, will not solve the problem. Have our police and bureaucrats shown themselves to be guardians of the poor? Which pool will these new, honest souls be culled from? In a country where a majority of the population is illegitimate in the ways in which they live and work, the Jan Lokpal Bill could easily become a weapon in the hands of the middle classes — ‘Remove these filthy illegal slums, clear away these illegal vendors crowding the pavements’ — and so on.”

Roy’s assessment of Indian democracy is brutally honest. While there are many others who are willing to give Kejriwal and other anti-corruption activists a chance to cleanse the system, they agree that the crusader’s task is enormous. As British economist and former Labour politician Meghnad Desai puts it, “In dictatorships, the top people restrict the fruits of corruption to the few they know. India, being a democracy, has democratised corruption. Once you are in, it is like living in the Forbidden City in Beijing. You are immune from legal consequences and you can go on being corrupt with impunity.”

It is too early to predict whether Kejriwal’s Aam Admi Party, the first such outfit by non-career politicians, will herald India’s Arab Spring. The party’s first electoral test is still months away but the party will be under close scrutiny of media and observers who will monitor its evolution from a guerrilla-type organisation to a mainstream political alternative.