AAP-hill battle | Road for Kejriwal’s return to CM’s chair riddled with hurdles

The resignation of Delhi Home and Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Atishi-led cabinet and his subsequent induction into the BJP is an indicator of the choppy waters Arvind Kejriwal must navigate in his bid to return his party to power in the Assembly polls due early next year.

The Federal has learnt that Gahlot’s imminent exit from the party and how the AAP would recoup from it had been a topic of discussion between Kejriwal and his closest aides for some time now. This, perhaps, explains how Gahlot’s induction into the BJP coincided with the AAP top brass swiftly picking Nangloi Jat MLA Raghuvinder Shokeen as his replacement in the Atishi. Shokeen, like Gahlot, comes from the Jat community, is a Delhi native and a second-term legislator.

Also read: Delhi Assembly elections will revolve around Kejriwal – yet again

Shokeen to fill Gahlot's shoes

Though Shokeen hasn’t yet been administered oath of office as minister and the AAP hasn’t officially commented on the portfolios he would hold, party insiders say the Nangloi Jat legislator is likely to “shoulder most responsibilities previously held by Gahlot”. The portfolios under Gahlot’s charge were home, transport, women and child development, information and technology, and administrative reforms.

AAP sources say with Gahlot abandoning his ministerial duties and the AAP three months before the Delhi polls, Shokeen’s first real task could be the rolling out of some of Kejriwal’s key populist schemes within the next month, including the Mahila Samman Rashi Yojana that promises a monetary dole of Rs 1,000 per month to all women aged 18 to 60 years. Sources added that the AAP leadership is already anticipating hurdles from the office of Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena and even the Election Commission in the scheme’s rollout so close to the election.

Since Gahlot was involved with every aspect of the scheme’s planning and execution as also with the details of some other big ticket announcements that the Atishi government was working on, the AAP also believes he would “provide the BJP inside intel” on such plans and ways to thwart them, both administratively and electorally. “A strategy to work around these expected hurdles is being actively discussed and we are confident of not letting the BJP stall our pro-people initiatives,” a senior AAP leader told The Federal.

Anticipating more setbacks

While the AAP may have some back up ready to offset the damage caused by Gahlot’s departure, party sources conceded that Kejriwal was also anticipating “more setbacks... especially defection of more MLAs to the BJP” over the next month.

“Gahlot isn’t our first MLA to quit and we know he won’t be the last...I don’t wish to go into specific details about individuals but we all know the pressure that the BJP has been able to exert on some of our MLAs through investigative agencies. The cases or allegations against Raaj Kumar Anand (another minister who quit AAP to join the BJP earlier this year) and Gahlot, everyone saw it (sic); there are some other MLAs also who have been similarly hounded (by probe agencies) and told that joining the BJP is the only way to save themselves... obviously, not everyone has the courage of Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, Sanjay Singh and Satyender Jain and so, naturally, some will cave in,” a close aide of Kejriwal said.

Also read: Flag hoisting, Cabinet reshuffle: Gahlot’s rift with AAP was growing for long

The first AAP leader quoted earlier added, “It is not that everyone who is quitting to join the BJP is doing so because of cases alone... this is election time, people change parties for various reasons... there are tough decisions that Kejriwal will have to take when we start finalising candidates and there are several MLAs who know that they may not be repeated so these people will also look for a party that will give them a ticket; it could be the BJP or even the Congress... we know some such MLAs who are already talking (to other parties) and it is their decision to stay or leave but we are confident it won’t affect our victory prospects.”

MLAs facing anti-incumbency

Given that the past two Delhi elections have returned the AAP to power with massive mandates – 67 of 70 seats in 2015 and 62 seats in 2020; sources said the party’s internal surveys had indicated a “considerable level of anti-incumbency against a little over a dozen MLAs, some of whom had also won in 2013 (when the AAP formed a short-lived minority government with outside support from the Congress)”.

Beyond the unpopularity of individual MLAs, AAP leaders also admit there is a “certain degree of dissatisfaction with the government”. The admission, however, comes with the prompt assertion that this was either “on account of the negative propaganda spread against us by the BJP with fake allegations like the excise policy case” or because, administratively, the government hadn’t been able to deliver all that it had promised due to “hurdles created by the Centre through the LG office”.

It was to contain the electoral damage that these factors could collectively cause the AAP that Sisodia was asked by Kejriwal to embark on a pan-Delhi padyatra the moment he was released from Tihar Jail earlier this year on bail. Kejriwal and Jain, who were released subsequently, have also joined this mass contact campaign since.

“Our assessment as of now is that while there is certainly a dip in the party’s popularity, we think it is still not on a scale that cannot be, at least partially, reversed... we know all the tricks that the BJP will resort to but we are confident that a large section of Delhi voters still view Kejriwal positively because of all the development and welfare work that has been done in the past 10 years,” an AAP MP and key poll strategist of the party told The Federal.

No one to challenge Kejriwal

By repeating ad nauseam in its campaigns that the upcoming election is all about returning Kejriwal to the CM’s chair, the AAP clearly hopes that a “Kejriwal nahi toh kaun?” message will help the party tide over its current and considerable electoral challenges, much like the “Modi nahi toh kaun?” rhetoric helps the BJP retain its pole position nationally.

Also read: Explained: The controversy over CM’s bungalow renovation by Kejriwal

“Kejriwal is obviously the face of the campaign and all our leaders, including the CM, have made it clear that this is an election to bring him back as CM... this is a message that strikes a chord with all the people who have benefitted personally from Kejriwal’s pro-poor, pro-people work. The BJP has nobody to match Kejriwal’s appeal,” said Delhi minister and key Kejriwal aide Gopal Rai.

There is another fallout of the AAP’s all out efforts to minimise the adverse electoral impact of recent and impending defections and the more serious taints of corruption and inefficient governance (the latter currently a hot topic in Delhi due to the national capital’s toxic air and the persistently rising pollution of the river Yamuna). This is the AAP’s increasingly visible reliance on the politics of caste and community in Delhi’s politics where such discourse, though always present, was largely kept for closed door considerations.

Politics of caste, community

The latest evidence of this was Kejriwal’s decision to replace Gahlot with fellow Jat Shokeen and the induction of former five-term MLA Chaudhary Mateen Ahmed, former three-term legislator Veer Singh Dhingan (both from Congress) and former two-term BJP MLA from Kirari, Anil Jha – a Muslim, a Dalit and a Brahmin from Purvanchal, respectively – into the AAP. The AAP also inducted former Congress MLA from Matiala and Jat leader Sumesh Shokeen into its ranks last week.

In fact, when Sisodia announced that Shokeen would take Gahlot’s place in the Delhi cabinet, he made sure to assert, more than once, the Nangloi Jat MLA’s caste credentials. “Raghuvinder Shokeen will be a minister in CM Atishi’s Cabinet. We all know that he is a popular leader from the Jat community and has done significant work in the field of education,” Sisodia told the press.

For good measure, Shokeen too played along, stating, “The BJP has consistently worked against the Jat community, whether it was during the farmers’ protests or the (protests by) women wrestlers (who allegedly faced sexual harassment by former BJP MP Brij Bhushan Saran Singh).” “In Haryana elections too, since the Hindu-Muslim divide did not work there, they divided Haryana through Jat and non-Jat politics,” Shokeen added.

The Jats constitute less than five percent of Delhi’s population but their concentration in certain regions, particularly Delhi Dehat, makes their support invaluable for any political party as the community’s consolidation can sway the poll outcome in nearly two dozen Assembly segments. Incidentally, Kailash Gahlot, Raghuvinder Shokeen and Sumesh Shokeen all come from the Assembly segments that fall in the Delhi Dehat region.

Also read: BJP resorts to fear-mongering ahead of Delhi polls as Congress, AAP remain indifferent

Not easy to woo Muslims, Dalits

Wooing the Muslims and the Dalits, who account for a little over 12 and 16 percent of Delhi’s population, respectively, back into the AAP’s fold has also been a challenge for Kejriwal. The party’s apathy towards Muslim victims of the 2020 Northeast Delhi riots and its forward caste tilt (the entire AAP top brass of Kejriwal, Sisodia, Atishi, Sanjay Singh, Gopal Rai, Satyender Jain, etc hails from upper castes) had dented the party’s popularity among the Muslim and Dalit communities even though these groups were among the biggest beneficiaries of Kejriwal’s populist schemes of free ‘bijli’ and ‘paani’.

The AAP’s failure to stand by its former minister and popular Dalit leader Rajendra Pal Gautam (now in the Congress) and its ambiguous stand during the Lok Sabha polls on the Congress-led INDIA bloc’s “Save Constitution” plank had also contributed to a depletion of its appeal among the Dalits, AAP insiders admit.

With the Delhi elections due in early February and the model code of conduct likely to be imposed by the Election Commission by mid-January, the AAP knows it has little time to set its damage-control measures in motion if it hopes to retain power. Gahlot’s departure is the first big blow the party has received in recent months but it won’t be the last.