AAP : Delhi Resignation and contesting on 432 seats in 2014 Lok Sabaha elections.

Arvind Kejriwal resigned from the post of chief minister on 14th February, 2014 after 49 days of governance in Delhi. Since then it is being said that a significant part of his supporter base has eroded away. I am not sure if “erosion” is a justified word to use but for sure the way he has resigned has created doubts in the mind of people & his genuine supporters.  I can confirm the same based on my participation in AAP’s volunteer Varanasi calling campaign. It is an important issue and hence I thought of putting down my thoughts on this.

Regarding quitting, Arvind has explained his reasoning at least 100 times. But for the moment, let’s not be MODIyabind type of blind followers and let’s try to analyze this move critically but at the same time logically. Let’s assume that it was largely a political move. But It was nonetheless very important, if not smart, move (more on this in last section). While being a chief minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal (AK) could not have taken the AAP to national level before 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He would always have been entangled in Delhi in one or the other nuisance created by political rivals. While in government, he was getting engaged more and more in futile issues like attack on Rakhi Bidlan, Somnath Bharti issue, Binny Singh’s compromise etc. So quitting, although on the grounds of principles, was a gamble that was played in the hope that people will take it as a sacrifice and will appreciate it and in the meantime he will be totally free for Lok Sabha elections before re-elections are held in Delhi. Unfortunately, the move has backfired (to some extent) and it is ok as in a big movement/revolution like this for a goal as large as like “corruption free India”, one loses some battles and wins some. In the end, what decides the fate is your perseverance and the means you adopted to reach the goal.

However, based on my discussion with people in Varanasi Calling campaign, unfortunately it is not the resignation but the way AK/AAP made it has caused more damage. In my opinion, he should have first created the news that he is going to resign after 7 days and should have borrowed some time to do direct communication with the people of Delhi. As it happened very quickly and people didn’t get any time to listen or react, his political rivals took this as a great opportunity to fill the vacuum with Kejriwal’s negative publicity in terms of his credibility, administration, governance ability and all. I am calling it unfortunate because it probably could have been anticipated given that our media is highly compromised (please see the video below for confirmation & IT IS NOT FROM AAP) . Surprisingly, international media is more hopeful than India media on AAP/AK for strengthening Indian democracy based on principles. ( another link , and here is another very important one on communal riots in India; 🙂 Isn’t it funny that people living outside India seem to be more concerned about India 🙂 )

Now comes the most important question of this discussion. Is it right to expand at national level ? Isn’t AAP stretching too much by contesting at 440+ seats.
I believe AAP is doing absolutely the right and very important thing. In fact it was one of the smartest and most important thing to do after Delhi election. By expanding at national level, AAP has formed a basic structure at national level and has connected all the good people together. It has put them in a garland like beads. Just read about their candidates from the list of AAP’s candidates : Soni Sori (Bastar, Chhatisgarh), Anoop Nautiyal (Tehri Garhwal), Rajmohan Gandhi (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi), Shastri ( Grandson of Lal Bahadur Shastri), Tilya Devi ( Nobel Peace prize nominee, Bihar) , Gul Panag ( Chandigarh) , Javed Jaffrey (Lucknow), Meera Sanyal (Bombay), Medha Patekar (Bombay) …… list is long. In fact 70% of people are those who have done something for country or society without being selfish. AAP has brought all these good people together. You might call them as activist and media might paint them as anarchists (after taking money from rivals) but the fact remains that these people have been fighting in their life for the right of the others and not for themselves. Isn’t it good for any democracy that unselfish people are being promoted. May be none of these people will win in this election but imagine even if they are in opposition and united what a support for the honesty and transparency in administration will it be. When AAP was doing anything good in Delhi it was creating ripples in whole NCR region. Now wonder even if 15 good people win from AAP in whole country and do the good work, what kind of positive impact it will have nationwide. It was such a necessary move that for this even a big & unfortunate step like resignation from Delhi sounds logical to me.

In the end, Well actually anything can be taken from both positive and negative perspectives. The sad part with India is that we are not trained to form our own perspective at all. In fact, we are trained and brought up in a way where you don’t question your senior’s (parent & teachers) perspective. Currently, media has become a big senior in our lives. We all just come home tired and grab anything that is thrown at us by media. Just imagine if Anna comes in 2019 saying I have formed a party, please vote for it. All the rivals and media will start throwing the jibe that where were you all these years. Now, imagine talking to people outside Delhi to be ready to vote for AAP in 2019 as we will expand then. Everyone’s reaction would be like , yea it’s ok we will see it then. And for that matter those who find something to criticize in AAP now, would have found even in 2019 if AAP had just remained in Delhi till 2019. They were anyway criticizing AAP even in during those 49 days when AAP was writing the history of good governance.

The challenge for AAP is that we, the common men of India, are so busy in our lives that we hardly get the time to dig the truth. And with Rs. 30,000 crore being spent in this election, NaMo to kya Dawood Ibrahim ki bhi wave banayee ja sakti hai. I discussed this with one of my friend and asked him where you get the information about AAP from. He says, news channels, newspaper and all. When I asked him, do you follow AAP’s facebook page as it takes only 5 minutes per day to get to know what they are doing. He said no and in fact looked upon me suspiciously as if I was asking him to read an extremist literature or some Lal Kitaab :). That’s sad but true. On the other hand, we all know but want to ignore the fact that a significant portion of media is compromised from medium to worst levels. I am not saying that everything is compromised but to a large extent of 30,000 crore is going in buying media space only.

Holy Nar once said it aptly, “We who are interested in relative truth have to keep digging for it and not let ourselves be sucked under.“

 Jai Hind.

PLEASE WATCH FOLLOWING LINKS (not from AAP) BEFORE YOU DIGEST THE FOOD GIVEN BY INDIAN MEDIA TO US ON DAILY BASIS.

——————————————-

Delhi : Rape, Capital & Dress Code

What “Delhi” means to the world at the moment….

I have been thinking of writing this for a long time and perhaps have been deferring it for even longer. But recently Kalki Koechlin posted a video after Delhi Rape Case and it finally got me moving to write my thoughts on this sensitive topic. There is no doubt about that rape is a very heinous crime and it’s perpetrators must be castigated harshly. Rape in itself not only shows the psyche of the rapist but also the frequency of such cases in a city reflects the state of the society altogether.

I have myself lived in Delhi for good 15 years and was lucky/poor enough to have traveled through those D.T.C. and Blue line buses. I have seen how the feminine gender is treated in these buses. In fact when I moved to Bangalore and saw how the women are respected in the city it opened my eyes about the definition of “metropolitan”. By the way, males are not harassed any less in these buses in Delhi. Pretty much all the private buses are run by local mafia and there is no background check for the driver, conductor or helper the of buses. In fact in the name of helpers, there are always 3-4 friends of the driver / conductor who are anytime ready for fighting & beating the passengers. Sometimes, these friends are pickpockets  too and loot the passengers on knife point.  I remember one incident when a young boy objected to the groping of a girl by the friends of the conductor of bus. This guy must have been very new to this environment of the bus, to which the other daily passengers had become used to. Perhaps his confidence in objecting to this also stemmed from the possible fact that he knew the S.H.O. of the area. But what he got in response from the conductor and his goon friends was shocking to everyone. One member of this gang slapped him hard and  told him “ Jo ukhadna hai ukhad le …..jis thane mein jaake report likhani hai likha le. Krishna Nagar, Seema Puri, Karkarooma har jagah ke ACP ko monthly jaata hai. “ . It might have been shocking for this guy but it was something I knew from inside because I had seen this bus mafia growing up in front of my eyes from the beginning till now. It all started in 1995-96. The population of “The Capital” was growing due to eternal immigration from the neighboring states and there were not enough buses for public commuting. It was then when Red Line buses were started.  The buses were operated by private operators under a permit from Delhi Govt. But ground level workers ( drivers & conductors ) were mostly the literate but unemployed youth of that time. Police personnel never took the ticket in these buses and similarly students also never paid for the rides in these buses. Whenever, conductor asked for ticket all the students will get united and will say “staff”. “Staff” was the term which police used to refer to the other fellow policemen of the force. And they used the same thing to mention in the buses to tell that he is from police. Students took it as verbatim and they also started saying that they are from staff and will not take the tickets. A couple of times bus owners and operators objected to this but their buses were either tormented or its windows were broken with stone pelting.  Soon, the bus owners realized that the way things were going it would never be a profitable business. In a period of 3-4 years either they quit the business or they roped in the local goons to run these buses. It was another side of the interesting story that those same students who were running “staff” in these buses 3 years back and were the front runners of any project of kind of damaging the buses were now being called for running these same buses by the owners.  Soon the seniors of college and students were going to threaten their alumni J to pay for the ride or be ready for the fight.  Eventually it had become the need of the business also for these buses to have a group of at least 3-4 people who were always ready to fight with anyone who wanted a free ride.  The number of deaths caused by accidents by these buses was growing. On the other hand bus operators had started giving bribes to the Govt. (D.T.C.) buses  to not to come on particular routes at prime time so that they could make maximum profits. In all the “Red Line” buses had all turned bloody red and that’s when their name was changed to “Blue Line” ; perhaps to disguise the dirt behind the scenes. When there was a medical student raped in MAMC case in Delhi in 2000, I was of the opinion that the rapists must be hanged. But my roommate then, who is a very smart guy said something that changed my opinion forever. He said it is not the amount of the punishment which maters but it is the swiftness and seriousness of the punishment which counts. He said that even 7 days in jail can be very tormenting so think of what 7 years would be. It is not that the punishment is less but it is that almost all the times rapists go scot-free due to lacking judicial and law & order system.

So that’s the story of buses in Delhi and somewhere tells about who and what kind of people those rapists of infamous Delhi Rape Case would have been. You must be thinking – that explains the rape and capital part, but what is here for “Dress Code”.  Well, Dress Code is the main thought which made me write this. I sometimes wonder what would be my opinion if my own sweet little daughter asks for my opinion on if is there any correlation to dress and rape. I would tell her this. Sweetie, just imagine that I give you 5 Crore rupees ( 1 million USD) in cash and ask you to take this to uncle’s place on the other end of the city. You also have to use only the public commute for this. How will you carry this money ? Will you carry this in a transparent plastic bag or will carry this barely fitting in your small and tiny pockets. Or will you try to properly wrap it in newspaper and hide it in some bag so that is not visible to others and move in with confidence in Metro. It’s all up to you. People get looted even when they are travelling in their own private cars but that doesn’t make any reasoning for carrying such a big amount in transparent plastic bag. Just the same way that carrying this money in plastic bag doesn’t justify the act of looting it by the criminals. So, sweetheart , just think your body is priceless It’s all up to you to decide if how you want to carry it. Do you want it to be a transparent bag or move with confidence in a no show wrapping …..

Related articles

• Rape cases double, molestation up 4 times in Delhi (thehindu.com)

Why Delhi ?

Aam Aadmi Party has decided to fight the Delhi Assembly Elections in 2013.  It is a very smart move and in fact makes me even a bigger fan of Arvind Kejriwal. When I bring him in the discussion, my friends say he is amateur, immature & inexperienced. Unfortunately they are either ill informed or not informed at all.

Let’s take the background first . Before deciding on elections, Arvind and Anna had campaigned, educating people to not to give vote to Congress in Himachal Pradesh.  In Himachal, Congress still won. But overall it was a good experiment. It proved somewhere that Arvind & Anna don’t have political ambitions but want the necessary change in the system. They preferred this change to come without him coming into the politics. On the other hand, the verdict of Himachal Pradesh elections clearly stated the agony of people of India – whom to vote ? To vote out the Congress meant is to vote in the BJP, which in one way or the other is the same thing.

Now, let’s analyze the decision of contesting elections in Delhi. I believe it is a very very smart & positive move.  First thing is that if AAP wins in Delhi it will send the tremors in the whole India. Just imaging the difference in the impact if AAP wins in Mizoram and AAP wins in Delhi. Which one will have more impact ?  I can bet if AAP wins in Mizoram, it will be talked only for 5 days and bad mouth politicians will be shouting that winning in Mizoram is nothing. If you have guts come and win some big state. Second thing is the feasibility of contesting. Delhi is geographically a very small state.   You can campaign at 5 different locations in a single day. On the contrary in Himachal or Mizoram, I won’t be surprised if there are locations/villages where it takes 5 days to reach from some other part of the country.  Delhi has basic infrastructure in place. You can cover a lot of constituencies in much lesser time. Delhi is also well connected by Delhi metro. So volunteers can come and work relatively easily. Third important factor is that let’s say AAP wins and implements some good things like – reducing electricity & water bills, controlling inflation and implementing JanLokpal bill. All of these things done in Delhi will have much larger impact nationwide  than done in Mizoram. And the last but not the least, Delhi’s voter is much more educated and easier to convince than the voters of most of the other parts of the country. So, in all it is a very smart & thoughtful bet that AAP is playing.

In the end, historically, whoever rules Delhi rules the whole of India. The Mughals replaced the Lodhi Dynasty; after 300-years they were replaced by the English and after 100 years English lost it to the All India National Congress on the eve of independence. I wish AAP good luck. I hope they win and continue the trend.