 Hello and welcome to News Clique. I am Paranjwai Gohar Chakruta. The Aam Aadmi Party has both the Indian National Congress and the Bharti Janta Party got something wrong in their understanding of the working of the Aam Aadmi Party led by the Chief Minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwan. This is a question several political analysts are asking other than the Bharti Janta Party and the Indian National Congress. The Aam Aadmi Party happens to be the only political party in India which is in power in two states, assuming you want to describe Delhi as a state. Be that as it may, Arvind Kejriwan is a polarizing personality. Those affiliated to the Congress love to describe him as he and his party as the B team of the BJP. So to discuss this and related issues, I have with me all the way from the United Kingdom. A young political analyst, Kesha Guha, he's been writing regularly on politics for NDTV.com. He studied history and politics in Harvard, grew up in Bengaluru, has written a novel, a work of fiction in 2019 called Accidental Magic published by Harper Collins. Thank you so much, Kesha for being with us, for being with the viewers of NewsClick. On the 26th of August, you wrote in your column in NDTV that both the Congress and the BJP failed to understand Arvind Kejriwan. If you can summarize your views of what you wrote in that article and then I'd like to segment our conversation into a few parts. We talk a little bit about whether the Amadbhi Party is really like the BJP's B team or it's supposed to be the Congress's A team. We look at the ideology or the lack of ideology or the absence of ideology of the Amadbhi Party and look ahead a little bit about its future. As it aspires to be an important plan in the forthcoming assembly elections in Gujarat. So let's start with you summarizing some of the main points you made in what you wrote. When I said that the Congress and the BJP failed or struggled to understand, this is what I meant. So you have to go back to the origins of Arvind Kejriwan. So the Amadbhi Party is a descendant of the 2011-2012 India against corruption movement. Now the IAC was one of the really major factors that helped to delegitimize and eventually bring down the UPI government of the Gandhi's and Manmohan Singh. And that legacy is important. The origin story is important because it's always been the view of people within the Congress that IAC was not some autonomous civil society movement that just rose up from the ground. Because the question was not spontaneous. Because the question they always ask is where did all these people come from? How did you fill Ram Deela Mehta? People in Delhi have not heard of Anna. Not everybody has heard of Anna, sorry. How do you organize this? And the answer that they give, at least in private, it's difficult for them to prove is that all this happened with the connivance of the BJP and RSS. And they provided the organization, they provided the trust. Now they can't prove it. What can be proved is what you've written in your article. And there's several people who are today with the BJP who are quite active in the India against corruption movement. I just came forward, you can elaborate on all of them. General V.K. Singh, former Chief of the Indian Army who is now Minister of State. We look at Kiran Mehdi, went on to become the governor of Puducherry, Anupam Kher, well-known actor. And of course, Baba Ramdev who allegedly wore a saree and disappeared in the middle of the night. Yes, please. Yeah, that's exactly right. And Baba Ramdev of course brought with him his followers as well. And yeah, one of the things I say in the article is if you look at the 2015 Delhi elections, it was a contest between two alumni of India against corruption. I mean Kejriwal and Kiran Mehdi. So, now what I say in the article is that even if this is true, now I don't know if this is true. I don't know if you know it's true, but even if it is true that there was BJP RSS involvement in India against corruption. It doesn't mean that R is the B team of the BJP because as I say, since from 1947 till 2014, the Congress was a dominant poll of Indian politics. More dominant at some times than at others perhaps, but by and large, the Congress was the only true pan-India party. Before 2014, the BJP had almost no presence in several states. In fact, it was thought that the BJP could not win an overall majority because in the south of the east of the country, it didn't have a strong enough presence. Now, of course, the BJP is an active organized energetic party even in states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu. But that was not necessarily the case 10 years ago, Odisha, West Bengal, the way they have done since then, you know, it wasn't the case 10 years ago. So the Congress was a dominant poll from 1947 onwards. And what that has meant in practice is all kinds of people have entered into partnerships, informal, formal in order to take on the Congress. Left and right, the communists and the BJP have worked together in 1989, where they had a kind of informal seed sharing alliance. And again, in 2008 after the... I'll tell you again, I'm interrupting you. In your own article, you go back further in time. You go back to the 70s. Okay, you have Prakash Narayan, Babu Jamjeevan Ram. You don't have to mention Jyoti Basu and Inderjeet Gupta of the left or Prakash Karad. And of course, you had even earlier, Samraj and Rajagopalacharya at different points of time to post the Congress. Yes, exactly. And I think in 1967, the opposition was divided. And after that, there was a view that if we're divided, we'll allow the Congress to win even when they're unpopular. And so as a result, yes, Rajapalacharya was a good example. Someone who was willing to enter into alliances with people whom he ideologically opposed to fight the Congress. And so I said, look, the fact that Arun Kejriwal may have been on the same side as the BJP once, that's because they had a common enemy, the Congress. It doesn't mean that it's because they share a common ideology or that they'll always be together or that they're working together today. I just want to just summarize the other argument of the argument, which is to do with how the BJP fails to understand. And that is to do with essentially what I say there is the BJP has spent the last decade expanding across India and partly they've offered a program, you know, a program of nationalism, of the charismatic leadership of the Prime Minister, but they've also employed what I call negative rebranding tactics against the other parties. So look, if you think of parties as a brand, they have their own image that they would like to spread. And conversely, the opposition is going to try to rebrand them in a different way. So the BJP, I said, has three main tactics, which I call it their rebranding toolkit, which are firstly to brand the party as either the party of the Muslims or a party of some specific caste. Or a party that abuses the Muslims. Yes, exactly. But also or a party of a specific caste group that's favoring a specific caste group. So for example, in Telangana, they accuse the ruling TRS of favoring the Velama caste or the BSP, they said they're not a Dalit party, they're a Jata party. So these kinds of strategies are the kind of the first one. The second is to accuse them of the second is to focus on the fact that this party is a dynastic party, where the BJP is a non at least at the top levels and non dynastic party. And the third is to make allegations of corruption. And so what I say in the article is that all of these three strategies, you know, Muslim appeasement or saying that you're a party of a specific caste group, dynasty and corruption. It's not been easy for them to apply these three strategies. These are the three. Okay. So Keshav, let's take up each of these points one by one. So let's talk about the alleged, you know, sort of appeasement of a certain community or Muslims or whatever. So let's focus on that for the time. And let's say that, yes, Arun KGY, it's often pointed out, never went to Shahid Bah. Whether a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act or the National Register of Citizens. He, maybe some of his colleagues, some of the other ministers in his government, he didn't go to Northeast Delhi after there were riots in early 2020, in early 2020. That's correct. It's in early 2020, you know, around the time Donald Trump visited Delhi. Yes, Arun KGY can recite the Hanuman Chalisa. Okay, it's not just visiting temples or organizing tours of these Hindu religious places. That's not all. At the same time, Arun KGY sort of uses it selectively. I'll give you one example. When there was a human cry about this film, Kashmir Files, he took them on. Yes. Why are you asking the Delhi government to give you entertainment tax exemption? You want more people to see Kashmir Files? Put it up on YouTube, let everybody have, you know, watch it. So when it comes to this whole issue of Muslim appeasement, Arun KGY plays in both ways, isn't it? That's right. And I remember right after they had won in Punjab, I remember the speech that he gave right after they had won in Punjab. And when he said that I don't do politics of nafrat, I do politics of pyar and that's Rahul Gandhi sometimes talks like that. But I think Kashmir Files is one of the only cases where he very directly took on the BJP on this issue. I think that it's very important to remember that Arun KGY was an open supporter of the government's replication of Article 370 and 35. Absolutely correct. And was basically silent on all issues to do with Ayodhya. So he and now I guess the real question is does all this mean to come back to other point about the B team? You know, does this mean that he actually looks like a person, is he an experienced politician? So my impression is from, you know, having lived for many years in Delhi under this up government is that their approach to these issues is to try to avoid risk. There are parties that look to see how can we avoid getting ourselves into trouble. And the second is that they have a very, very robust, at least in Delhi, a very, very robust system of understanding what you might call the sentiment on the ground. Now, you see, it's a two way thing because parties also have the ability to shape the sentiment on the ground. But I think ARP is essentially trying to find out in real time what to go to think about something and then respond as opposed to a party with a strong ideology. In fact, the phrase that you have used is that it seems to be devoid of ideology. I mean, at one level, it's sometimes with the so-called Nitholawala socialists or leftists. And on other occasions, he's with the die hard, through economic liberalization, sort of, you know, you want to start courses in entrepreneurship, etc, etc. So in that Prashant Bhushan and Yadav who were once a part of not just the India against corruption movement, but also with the Ahmadi Party, who parted ways with him. They accuse him of being no different from any of the opportunistic political parties he opposes from time to time. Well, it's very interesting that you bring them up because, you know, of course, now at least you and me, Yadav, I know is participating in Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra, which is quite a ton of events, you know, given both his India against corruption legacy. Well, it's a fact that three years ago, he wrote an article saying that the country needs the Congress to disappear, and that we won't move forward, the opposition can't move forward unless the Congress disappears. I think what that illustrates, Pundra, is just, again, that in politics everything is contingent and today someone is your enemy and tomorrow they... No permanent friends, no permanent enemies. I just want to say one, just on the point of ideology and Muslim appeasement. See, there are both gains and loses from this because, as a really does not have credibility among minority voters, as a party that will be a defender of India's pluralist secular constitution and, such as we say, social and political tradition. So in both the 2017 and 2019 elections, I think Kejriwal quite openly said that he felt that Muslim voters at the last minute had moved to the Congress. And he framed this as kind of a betrayal, but I think the reality is that that's because our party had not been able to establish that credibility. You could argue that our everybody took the Muslim voters almost for granted. Then, you know, I don't have to go to Scheinbach, I don't have to go to Northeast Delhi. You're anyway going to vote for me. Yeah, and I think that now they feel that because the Congress is all but wiped out in Delhi, Muslim voters have no other choice. Okay, we'll have to vote for them by default. Okay, let's move quickly to the second issue on family domination. Parivar, wow, you rightly pointed out another Modi, you know, Modi can take on the Congress on the whole issue of dynasty, but he can't take on the Ahmadi party. So, you know, that is one thing. I mean, so from time to time, somebody, I mean, from the Ahmadi party will take a pot shot. We'll take a pot shot at an oligarch or you know, say, okay, here is Jay Shah, you know, Amir Shah's son, you know, sitting on a pile of cash as the head of the Indian Premier League and so on and so forth. So this again somewhat, you know, you pick and choose the issue depending on what suits you. Yeah, but the dynasty part I think is a very important one. I think brief history lesson is in order. Look, dynasty really starts when Indira Gandhi brings Sandra Gandhi into the Congress. Not one minute, not when Pandit Nehru brings Indira Gandhi. That's a good point. So the reason I say this is because, look, Muzila Nehru was president of the Congress. Jawaharlal Nehru was president of the Congress. Indira Gandhi was president of the Congress. But when Pandit Nehru died, he was not succeeded by Indira Gandhi. He was succeeded by Lal Mahadev Shastri. Yes, Shastri brought Indira into his cabinet. But there was no call for Nehru to be succeeded by Indira Gandhi. There's absolutely no evidence that Nehru wanted to be succeeded by Indira Gandhi. Indira Gandhi by contrast brought Sanjay Gandhi who was 23 or 24 years old while she had been, you know, almost 50 when she became Prime Minister. She brought him into politics. She gave him, when he, before he held any political office, a huge amount of power. And it was very clear that he was going to be her successor. And then when he died in, you know, he's in a, in a plane crash, she then brought the other Sunrati into politics. And when she died, there was no question that anybody else would succeed her. So after she did this, party after party across India established the principle of domestic succession. The Akali Dal, the PMK, the... You can name many of the regional parties, the Samajwadi party that you can even accuse the Srinomul Congress of not being very different. Exactly, exactly. And for the Biju Janta Dal? Exactly. Well, no, no, no. I switch to the Biju Janta Dal. I think the Biju Janta Dal is the fact that Naveen Patnaik has no children. Okay. It has allowed him to escape the usual a problem that a dynastic party attracts. So people still see him as self-sacrificing. They think of him as someone who gave up a life in Delhi or an international life to come and serve. You can talk about the Shiv Sena also. And the key point here is that, there's two things that I have to be said. The first is that dynastic, I call dynasticism an incurable disease. Once a party has become dynastic, it has never reversed. It has never happened in the history of Indian politics. There are parties that had become dynastic, reversed, and went back to being non-dynastic. The second thing is, as far as the voter is concerned, and this is really important because people keep saying, what about Jaysha? What about Anurag Thakur? Voters care about the top of the party. They are not looking at whether an individual MLA or MP is the son of another MLA or MP. They are asking, on what basis does the top job of the party? Okay, all right. So I think you made an important point. Let's quickly move on in the interest of time to look at the third point to be it on the issue of corruption. You referred to how Jaya Lalitha's popularity was apparently not dented despite the fact that she was prosecuted and actually jailed for corrupt practices. You start your article in NTTV.com by saying, in 2015 on the eve of elections, the BJP talked about Hvala at midnight and the then Minister of State for Commerce, Nirmala Sita Ramana, our present finance minister accused the Amadbhi party of laundering huge sums of money, humongous sums of money, Arvind Kejriwalu being a so-called chore. Finally, the Amadbhi party worked 167 out of the 70 seats in Delhi and the BJP didn't talk about this again every now and then. Now the new issue again, the so-called liquor or whatever excise duty or liquor scandal. Now, there's a counter attack. Manish Surya says, oh, they didn't find anything. Prime Minister Modi's department's enforcement directorate, these guys rated me, what did they get? Nothing. And then they sort of counter attack. Arvind Kejriwalu says, you know, the BJP has bought over 270 MLAs in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Goa, Manipur, Meghalaya, Arunachal, Maharashtra, etc. etc. etc. And if you assume him, he spent 20 crore on buying each MLA, he would have spent 45,400 crore. That's a direct attack. So this issue of corruption as an issue, as a political issue, your thoughts? So what matters with corruption is not whether you are corrupt, but two other things. The first is whether people perceive you to be corrupt. And the second is how they feel about you. Let's take the example of the current government. If you look at the scheme like Electoral Bonds. And Electoral Bonds, it should be said, the opposition parties don't oppose with any energy. And my suspicion is if an opposition government came to power, I don't think they would scrap Electoral Bonds. That's quite a cynical view we have to wait and watch. Because if you look at the way the opposition talks, especially the Congress, they just complain about how few Electoral Bonds they get. They don't really attack the scheme as a whole. And I think the reason, I mean, voters, in 2019, Rahul Gandhi's whole campaign was predicated on the approach and I want to reverse this situation where Mr. Modi is perceived to be honest and my party is perceived to be corrupt. And going all the way back to Bofors. Yeah, and eventually we know what happened. Chokhidhar Chor hai, Ham Chokhidhar, Rafael Deal, etc. And the point there was that voters did not find Rahul Gandhi to be a credible messenger for that message. So who the credible messenger would be is another question. But if Rahul Gandhi was saying that Modi is a Chor, voters weren't buying it. And the point there is it's very, very difficult to just accusing someone of corruption. It's not going to lead voters to decide they're corrupt. We're not here saying that similarly in BJP, by merely accusing Arvind Mejwala and Manish Sisodia to be Chors, again may not have much of an impact, which really brings me to the next part of what I was saying. You know this huge human cry about free bees. I mean, in Uttar Pradesh, you give rations, you give wheat and you give chana khadaal, chickpeas. You transfer money to the bank account, you build toilets, you give cooking gas cylinders and still the Prime Minister talks about the railway culture. Now, here again we see the fight. The Ahmadini Party says on the healthcare front, on the education front, we've done great work. The same thing happens. You see, okay, your Mahalla clinics, your government schools, which are today supposed to be better than public schools in the national capital. And when the New York Times writes a detailed article, the BJP says it's paid news to the extent where the New York Times itself issues kind of rejoined saying, no, we haven't paid and nobody's paid us to write this report kind of thing and it all coincided. Front page of NYT and the rage on Manish Sisodia. Your thoughts. So I think this issue, this rave issue is one where firstly I felt that for the first time that the BJP's heart didn't seem to be in what they were saying. So when the BJP goes after the Congress for corruption, when they go after the Congress for dynasty, when they go after the Congress for Muslim appeasement, so to speak, when they go after the Congress for being a party of Khan market liberals, they really believe it. I mean, these are not just cynical political tactics. Everyone from the BJP leaders down to the BJP boot worker passionately believes in these arguments. And that gives those arguments a certain force. And here with the with the rave D that force is not there but look at I think here I have to say up has, you know, simply outplayed the BJP, because instead of imagine if it was the other way around the BJP's first approach is to accuse you of hypocrisy what they call what about But KJW didn't say, what about Ujwala is that a free free be whatever PM Kisan is that a free be what about rations are those free be instead he talked about his own popular schemes. He said, he's education free be our mohalla clinic freebies are, you know, buses freebies. And it because his work is at least because on those issues his work is popular, it actually allowed him to take control of the narrative. And it's a I think it's just another sign that the BJP is still looking for that message what is that anti up message that is really going to work. The really thing to me shows that they haven't found it yet. Okay, so so really, two last questions to you. What do you see the near term, or even the long term future of the Ahmadi party. I mean, yes, in Gujarat it certainly wants to replace the Congress as the principal opposition party, if not come to power, of course, these are things they will never say publicly but that's the expectation. You see, the up having failed to, you know, expand its footprint in Goa way back if you go back to 2014, Arvind K.G. Wal was a man in a hurry, he was all over he even contested against the Prime Minister against Mr. Narendra Modi from Banaras. And he didn't make him, he didn't get very far, whether in your own state of Karnataka up has, you know, tried to expand its footprint in Maharashtra everywhere and not succeeded. Maybe we would agree they were premature etc. etc. So how do you see the near term and the medium term future of the Ahmadi party? That's my penultimate question. Yes, so I wouldn't directly answer it, but I think just to add to what you say in the question, I think you should also be remembered that the Ahmadi party, whether by its own intention or whether by the, as a consequence of the way it does its business, is not a part of this broader anti-Modi opposition coalition. The rest of the opposition is very suspicious of the Ahmadi party because they think of it as being a BJP type party that has the aspiration to eat into their woodsheds and eventually replace them. And the BJP is equally, you know, as suspicious or you would say even worried. The BJP and the AAP are the two parties in India that have no genuine friends. I mean, the BJP had two long standing alliances with the Akali Dal and the Shiv Sena and they've managed to break or lose both and with the JDU as well. And Arvind KGP was supported the farmers' education. Exactly. And done incredibly well in Punjab, better than its own expectations. So in terms of the future of Ahmadi, well, the reasons to be skeptical, is that the AAP has currently is a party with zero Lok Sabha seats. So that's, you know, let's remember exactly what we're talking about here. It's a party that's up against the BJP is a social movement going back to the 1920s. It's a political party attached to a social movement like the Congress used to be. Yeah, this is going to be 100 years old in 2025. Exactly. And here you have a movement that really started in 2011-2012 in the home of India against corruption and then the Ahmadini Party. The BJP is a truly pan-India party. AAP really is not. You could also perhaps, let's see, but one could perhaps raise some certain concerns about the AAP statics, you know, because for example, they have chosen to emphasize Gujarat, rather than Himachal or previously Uttarakhand. They are also in Himachal, maybe not in Himachal. Of course. Of course. But if you look at where Arvind Kejriwal is spending his time, he's looking at Gujarat as being a place. In fact, the day after Manish Sodhya was raided, he and Arvind Kejriwal are campaigning in Gujarat. Exactly. And the AAP's ambition in Gujarat appears or the summit of the ambitions in this election is to come second, not to come first. The idea is can you displace the Congress and can you emerge as the second largest party in Gujarat. But I think the reasons, on the other hand, to be optimistic about AAP or AAP's prospects are, the first is, or who is it? You know, it's just the only person who has the only party that is showing the ambition to go nationalist is AAP. And as long as, I think, look, is there any evidence that the Congress is going to reverse the trend of recent decades? Because you go back to Indira Gandhi's death in 1984. It is a straight line trend of secular decline for the Congress. There would be exception of 1984. Exactly. Which is really an election shaped by Indira Gandhi's death. After that, 89, 91, 96, all the way to 2019, you are seeing the Congress slipping back at every election. 2009 is the one little moment where the vote shed temporarily goes up. 2004, 2009, the UPA. Even 2004, there was more cases of switching to other alliances. I mean, the Congress only had 145. That's correct. That's correct. So there is a vacuum. And look, the BJP is not the party that it was 10 years ago because India is a young country. I'm 31 and I'm actually probably older than the average Indian because India... The median age of India is supposed to be some people say 27, some people say 26. Exactly. Exactly. And by now we are supposed to have overtaken China. Exactly. And that means that hundreds of millions, a majority of Indians have only really known Mr. Modi. In their whole lives, they've only really known Prime Minister Modi. So if you look at something like the Agni Party, the protests against the Agni Party scheme, what they tell you is that the BJP is not the insurgent anymore. It's the establishment. When people think of a Sarkar or Pradhan Mantri, they think of BJP and Narendra Modi. It's the new party of government. And that means that you have to own the consequences of your governance. And gravity and politics always applies. No one's popularity is permanent. Even Pandit Nairu's popularity had faded by the end of his life. And once there is eventually that discontent is directed at the government. And that is I suppose what Arvind Kejriwal is counting on, that he builds up his party and when voters want to change, he would be the only person who is providing them with that option. Okay, Keshav, we've run out of time. This is positively my last question and a personal one. Yes, you are just 31 years old. You have been interviewed on your book, which is Accident of Magic in 2019. You interviewed people, but I presume this is one of the first times or perhaps the first time that you are being interviewed on the political situation. When are you going to follow in your father's footsteps and write a book of non-fiction? I know you're going to write, you have another book of fiction happening, but when will my friend Ram Guha San who writes something on history or contemporary politics, can we expect that? Yeah, I don't know. We both write, but I think probably very different books and fiction is really my main thing. But we'll see. I mean, nothing immediately planned on that. We'll keep writing articles. Thank you so much, Keshav. On behalf of the viewers of New Slick, all those who heard you and watched you, thank you very much for giving us your time from the United Kingdom early in the morning for you when we're recording this program. And for the viewers of New Slick, that was Keshav Guha evaluating the working of the Ahmadi Party. So you keep watching New Slick. Subscribe to this channel, become a subscriber of New Slick. Yes, do support independent journalism. There's too much of the media in India, which is go the media to use Ravish Kumar's famous word. Support independent journalism. Keep watching New Slick. Thank you very much for being with us.