How Kejriwal has outwitted rivals with his surprise move to step down as Delhi CM

Less than 48 hours after he walked out of Delhi’s Tihar Jail on bail, Arvind Kejriwal caught his rivals and many within his Aam Aadmi Party by surprise, declaring that “two days from now” he would resign as Delhi’s chief minister – the post he had clung on to throughout the six months of his incarceration.

Kejriwal’s announcement, on Sunday (September 15), at a gathering of his party workers at AAP’s Delhi headquarters, is characteristic of his archetypal praxis of keeping his opponents constantly guessing his next move and taking his political battle to them before they are prepared to engage.

If the Delhi CM sticks to his word, the next two days will see him writing to Delhi LG VK Saxena recommending dissolution of the Assembly to pave way for fresh polls in the city-state. Kejriwal has said he wants the Election Commission to conduct the Delhi polls alongside the Assembly elections due in Maharashtra and Jharkhand in November. The Delhi Assembly polls are otherwise due in February 2025.

Party colleagues stunned

In another announcement that is as intriguing as his own decision to step down, Kejriwal has said his close aide and former Deputy CM Manish Sisodia, also out on bail in the Delhi excise policy case, will not be taking over from him as the caretaker CM until the Assembly elections.

That Kejriwal’s announcement stunned many of his own party colleagues can be gauged from the fact that on Friday, when the Supreme Court had granted him bail in the CBI’s case against him, AAP sources were busy predicting that the CM’s first order of business after his release from Tihar Jail could be to seek a rejig of his cabinet to reinstate Sisodia as his deputy in government.

As Kejriwal put to rest all such rumours on Sunday, AAP leaders refrained from speculating what their boss’ next move could be. “He has said the MLAs will meet to elect a caretaker CM. Of course, there will be demands that he should continue to lead but Kejriwal must have thought this through before announcing; whoever he chooses will naturally be accepted as the CM by the MLAs so we have to now wait to find out who that person is,” an AAP MLA told The Federal.

By choosing to step down and also ruling out the possibility of Sisodia’s ascension, Kejriwal, say sources close to him, wants to dispel the notion that he is “hungry for power”.

“When he chose to remain CM despite being arrested, it was a principled stand meant to tell people that he was being wrongfully framed by the BJP as part of political vendetta and that he was confident his innocence will be proven. The BJP kept saying Kejriwal was not resigning because he was greedy for power but now the BJP will have nothing to say except calling it political drama. We will go to the people and tell them how the BJP tried to hound Kejriwal and other party leaders because they refused to bow before Modi,” another AAP leader said.

Not after the throne

The AAP will also remind voters of how Kejriwal has “never been after the throne (kursi ke peeche nahi bhagte hain)”, said party sources. While announcing his decision to step down, Kejriwal made it a point to tell party workers that he had resigned from the CM’s post in 2014 too, 49 days after first assuming the role, because for him it was “always the will of the people of Delhi that is supreme”.

In 2014, the AAP was running a minority government with the outside support of the Congress, when Kejriwal decided to step down as the chief minister. At the time, Kejriwal had claimed that a survey conducted by his party revealed that Delhi’s voters did not want him to continue as CM with support of the very party they had trounced in the polls months earlier following a deafeningly belligerent campaign against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.

When fresh polls for Delhi were finally conducted in 2015, the AAP swept to power with an unprecedented majority of 67 seats in the 70-member Delhi Assembly against the 28 seats that it had won in its 2013 debut. The Congress, which had ruled Delhi for 15 years between 1998 and 2013, failed to win a single seat in the Delhi Assembly, a situation that continued in the 2020 polls too.

The circumstances propelling him to step down from the CM’s post now may be vastly different from those of 2014 but the bottomline in Kejriwal’s messaging will remain the same – unlike other politicians, he doesn’t lust for power.

Political drama, say rivals

Whether Delhi voters accept his assertions and reward him with a fourth consecutive term is too early to predict. What is, however, clear is that Kejriwal’s decision has rattled both the BJP and the Congress. Despite their own rivalry, the BJP and the Congress sounded strikingly similar in their reaction to Kejriwal’s announcement.

Vijender Gupta, the BJP’s leader of Opposition in the Delhi Assembly, and former Congress MP Sandeep Dikshit both dubbed Kejriwal’s declaration a “political drama” meant to “mislead the people of Delhi” by diverting attention away from “Kejriwal’s and AAP’s role in the excise scam and the many failures of his government”. Talking to The Federal separately, both leaders also wondered “why is he waiting for two days to resign; if he really wants to step down, he could do it right away”.

Sources in both BJP and Congress, however, conceded that Kejriwal’s announcement had given the AAP an edge over them in “dictating the narrative for the Delhi Assembly polls”. BJP insiders said that the party, which has failed to come to power in Delhi for over a quarter century, is far from finalising its poll strategy for the national capital and also has “no mass leader who can be projected as an alternative to Kejriwal”.

Gives AAP an edge

“The excise policy scam and other failures of the AAP government, including the Delhi’s civic mess that the monsoons have completely exposed, gave us an opportunity to attack Kejriwal but the fact remains that there is a massive difference between the AAP and our support base in Delhi even today. Our last government in Delhi was in 1997-1998 and we have still not been able to come up with a leader who has an appeal across Delhi. The AAP, on the other hand, has created a huge constituency for itself among Delhi’s middle and lower classes because of its freebies culture... now Kejriwal has outwitted us by this offer to resign; we can keep calling him corrupt but that will not be enough to defeat him electorally,” a former BJP MP from Delhi said.

For the Congress, the electoral challenges are far greater. Even a decade after losing power to the AAP, the Congress hasn’t been able to formulate a viable strategy to take on Kejriwal. There is a clear disconnect between the Congress’ central leadership and its Delhi unit on how they wish to engage with Kejriwal. The Delhi Congress leaders see Kejriwal and the AAP as their primary rival in Delhi but the high command, particularly Rahul Gandhi, views them as important allies against the BJP.

This disconnect saw the Congress high command forcing its state leaders into forming an alliance with the AAP during the June Lok Sabha polls. The gambit failed. Neither the AAP, which contested on four Lok Sabha seats, nor the Congress, which contested Delhi’s remaining three seats, triumphed against the BJP’s nominees. Earlier this month, at Rahul’s insistence, the Congress explored the possibility of yet another alliance with AAP for the upcoming Haryana Assembly polls but after warring factions of the Haryana Congress ganged up to resist the high command’s diktat, the talks failed.

No more alliance talks

Congress sources said the failure of the alliance talks in Haryana has practically ended the possibility of another tie-up with the AAP for Delhi and that the Delhi Congress was now “on its own” to battle both AAP and BJP at the hustings.

“It is true that nobody in the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee wants an alliance with the AAP but it is equally true that in the last 10 years, our party has been completely hollowed out in Delhi. We lost most of our traditional base to the AAP and now, barring Muslim-dominated seats where AAP has lost some support due to its past politics and Kejriwal’s dubious role during the Northeast Delhi riots, we have no ground to stand on electorally in Delhi. After Sheila Dikshit, we have also failed to create any new mass leader in Delhi... our revival strategy in Delhi is directionless and if the Assembly elections are held before time as per Kejriwal’s plan, I am afraid our performance will be the same as it was in 2015 and 2020,” a former three-term Congress MLA told The Federal.

By proposing early polls and offering to step down as CM until then, Kejriwal has made the first strike of his election strategy for winning Delhi again without divulging any hint of what his next move could be. Of course, Delhiites will still have to wait two days to see Act II of Kejriwal’s strategy unfold and how the LG or even the Election Commission – both perceptibly partisan to the Centre’s Narendra Modi dispensation – respond to the AAP convener’s proposal for early elections. For now though, the wily Kejriwal has outfoxed his rivals.