Will bail for ‘Haryana ka Laal’ Kejriwal bolster electoral fortunes of AAP in poll-bound state?

Granted bail by the Supreme Court, on Friday (September 13), six months after he was arrested in the Delhi excise policy case Arvind Kejriwal may not be able to fully resume his role as the Delhi chief minister just yet due to the conditions of the bail order. However, his release from Delhi’s Tihar Jail comes at an opportune time for his beleaguered Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

With Kejriwal out on bail, the AAP now has a near full house of its top brass. Former Delhi Deputy CM Manish Sisodia and AAP MP Sanjay Singh, who also spent time in Tihar Jail for their alleged links with the excise policy case, had been released on bail earlier this year, leaving former Delhi health minister Satyendra Jain as the only Kejriwal aide still behind bars in the same case.

The bail for Kejriwal comes weeks before Haryana, Delhi’s adjoining state where the AAP hopes to make electoral in-roads despite its failure to strike an alliance with the Congress party, goes to polls on October 5. The AAP hopes that Kejriwal’s presence in the poll campaign will boost the party’s admittedly modest poll prospects in Haryana.

'Son of Haryana'

Over the past month, Kejriwal’s wife, Sunita, and other party leaders have been campaigning across Haryana stressing on the fact that the Delhi CM was “born in Haryana” and wants to “transform Haryana’s education, healthcare and civic infrastructure just like Delhi” while simultaneously appealing to the voters to “get justice for the son of Haryana” who was being “punished by the BJP for standing up against Narendra Modi”.

“We are eagerly waiting for him to join and lead the campaign. Haryana borders Delhi so the people here don’t really need to be told about the development that Kejriwal has done in Delhi but having him present for the campaign will give us a big boost. We are finalising his rallies and will share the details soon,” AAP’s Haryana unit chief Sushil Gupta told The Federal.

Expanding footprint

Over the past 11 years of its existence, the AAP may have established its dominance in Delhi and, in 2022, even assumed the reins of power in Punjab, but it has had no luck in expanding its electoral footprint in Haryana. However, in the June Lok Sabha polls, when it entered into an alliance with the Congress as part of the INDIA bloc and contested Haryana’s Kurukshetra seat, its candidate, Sushil Gupta, lost to the BJP’s Naveen Jindal by a slender 29021-vote margin, having polled an impressive 5.13 lakh votes.

The party’s Kurukshetra performance, though amplified only because of the alliance with a resurgent Congress, has given the AAP hope of building on those gains in the upcoming assembly polls and finally making a debut in the Haryana assembly. Though AAP insiders say this is easier said than done, given that the Congress appears comfortably poised to trounce the ruling BJP, they say Kejriwal’s presence in the campaign could help “substantially increase our vote share... maybe even help us win a seat or two”.

Focus on Delhi

The more significant impact of Kejriwal’s release would, however, be in Delhi where the AAP has been struggling to counter multiple challenges six months before it faces the assembly polls.

The heat of the excise policy case aside, the party’s governance has come in for strong criticism not just by the BJP and the Congress in Delhi but also among voters in recent months due to shoddy monsoon preparedness by the AAP-run Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the state government. A compulsorily obstructionist Delhi Lieutenant Governor, VK Saxena, has stalled various administrative decisions of the Kejriwal government on one pretext or the other.

As such, though Kejriwal may have been barred by the Supreme Court from going to his office at the Delhi Secretariat or even from signing files, except when unavoidable, his priority, AAP sources said, would be to set things right for his party and its government in the national capital.

A senior Delhi government minister told The Federal that the party was “examining the bail order” to see “what duties of the CM can Kejriwal continue to discharge without any hurdles” and “if there is a need to move the Supreme Court seeking greater clarity on the issue”.

‘No major hurdles’

“Prima facie, we don’t see any major administrative hurdles due to the bail conditions. Abhishek Manu Singhvi (Congress leader, senior advocate and Kejriwal’s counsel) will brief us on the finer points of the bail order and about what Kejriwal can or cannot do as CM but as far as we understand, while he is not allowed to go to the Delhi Secretariat or to sign files, there is no bar on him from convening meetings of the cabinet and officials at his residence nor on instructing them about the decisions that the government wants to implement on priority basis. Since he does not handle any specific portfolio, the department related decisions or signing of files can be done by the ministers concerned and there is always the option of cabinet decisions, which are collective decisions of the government and not that of the CM as an individual,” the minister explained.

Sources said Kejriwal could also ask the Delhi LG to effect a small reshuffle of his cabinet to bring Sisodia back as deputy chief minister and fill up the vacancy created by the resignation of former social welfare minister Rajkumar Anand, who resigned from the cabinet and the AAP in April this year and subsequently joined the BJP following a brief two-month stint with the BSP. A meeting of the National Capital Civil Service Authority (NCCSA), which has the Delhi CM as its chief, is also on the cards for a reshuffle of the Delhi bureaucracy.

Blueprint for polls

While Kejriwal will have much to do on the governance front, AAP leaders say he will also soon begin drawing up the blueprint for the party’s Delhi assembly poll campaign.

“The elections will be tougher than the ones we fought in 2015 or 2020 because of the current political circumstances. Arvind has to take command and start preparations now. The happenings in Haryana (failure of the Congress-AAP alliance talks) have made it clear that AAP will be contesting solo in Delhi, which is good because in Delhi, the Congress has nothing to offer to us which was clear in the Lok Sabha polls too; we can’t lose any time... we have to start going to the people, mobilising our cadres, ensuring that the voters see how Arvind and our other leaders were unfairly targeted as part of a BJP conspiracy,” another senior AAP leader told The Federal.

The failed alliance in Haryana and the continuing attacks against Kejriwal and other AAP leaders by Congress’ Delhi and Punjab unit leaders is also bad news for the INDIA bloc, which now has the added task of finding a new consensus maker and peace emissary after the demise of CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury. Like in Haryana, the AAP and the Congress had also allied during the Lok Sabha polls in Delhi and Gujarat. However, the alliance lost on all seven seats of Delhi (AAP had contested four and the Congress on three) while in Gujarat, the Congress picked just one seat against nil of the AAP, which had contested on two.

Blame game on

Ever since the Lok Sabha results, the Delhi unit of the Congress and the AAP have been blaming each other for the wipe out in the national capital.

The Federal had reported earlier that the Congress’ Delhi leaders had told a committee set up by party chief Mallikarjun Kharge to assess the poor poll performance, that the AAP cadres sabotaged their campaign. AAP leaders, on the other hand, have been complaining that though Kejriwal and his colleagues campaigned for all Congress candidates in Delhi – JP Aggarwal, Kanhaiya Kumar and Udit Raj, the Congress’s Delhi and central leadership refused to turn up for AAP candidates.

On Friday too, as Kejriwal was released from Tihar Jail, Devender Yadav, the Congress’ Delhi unit chief, told reporters that the Delhi CM was “merely out on bail” and that the Supreme Court order “in no way establishes his innocence in the excise policy case... the court has evidence against him and other AAP leaders; they have just given him bail because the CBI could not take the case for trial”. Yadav's comments were strikingly similar to the assertions made by the BJP against the Delhi CM. Kejriwal is unlikely to take these slights from the Congress lightly and is bound to hit back, particularly once he is on the campaign trail.