AAP discrediting democracy, playing dangerous game

FILE PIC: AFP

The Aam Aadmi Party came into the Indian political system as an original but has now been reduced to using a look-alike to promote its cause. On Tuesday, it conducted a farcical and laughable exercise to demonstrate vulnerability of electronic voting machines. Using the Delhi Assembly floor, one of its 'experts', who is also a Legislator, Saurabh Bharadwaj, offered a live demonstration of the 'hacking' of an EVM-like contraption and triumphantly claimed that the motherboard could be changed in a flat 90 seconds to rig the machine. While the AAP members in the House looked around with much glee and satisfaction, incredulity hit the people of Delhi and the country over the AAP's silly drama. Here is a party which has just comprehensively lost elections in not just Delhi but also Punjab and Goa, and all that it had to do was conduct 'live demonstrations' of a technical kind.The party's focus on the machine and not the people's mandate is amazing, given that people speak through the EVMs. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has dared the Election Commission of India to provide the AAP a real EVM and claimed he would get it hacked. Kejriwal loves to use the 'dare' word in the flimsiest manner but he dare not employ it when it comes to baring the party's wrongdoing. For instance, after one of its Ministers (now sacked), Kapil Mishra, furnished material that points at the Chief Minister's complicity in illegalities conducted by a senior Minister, the party did not dare him to prove it. Its senior leader and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia instead said the matter was too frivolous to be even commented upon. The AAP couldn't dare, of course, because Mishra had material, whose veracity will be known in the coming months. He has already approached the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Anti-Corruption Bureau. Hell hath no fury than a Minister mocked. Mishra has now extended his ambit beyond the Satyendra Jain-Kejriwal link; he is talking of the tankers scam and irregularities in political donation and foreign visits by AAP members. IF the AAP thought it could seize the country's attention through its play with an EVM-lookalike and brush under the carpet Mishra's allegations, it has failed. The people are still glued to the party's slow but steady implosion. The EVM-and-poll panel bashing has done nothing to divert public attention from the grave charges that are being levelled against the party leadership and its functioning. Much before the Kapil Mishra episode, nearly half of Kejriwal’s Cabinet had come under one or the other allegation, ranging from financial irregularity to molestation to fraud. Some of the Ministers had to quit, but not before the Chief Minister disgracefully defended the indefensible. The facade of practising transparency and promoting inner-party democracy had been ripped apart even before, after Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav were humiliated and shown the door for questioning the dubious ways of the leadership’s functioning. Today it stands further exposed with the revolt in its Punjab unit. Arvind Kejriwal and his party have been very unwise to take on the Election Commission for three reasons. The first is that the poll panel is right on top of the credibility list along with the judiciary, and questioning it is akin to denting one's own image. It’s worse when the AAP uses dummy machines to discredit the poll panel. The second is that the the Election Commission is presently seized with a case of disqualification of 21 AAP Legislators on an office-of-profit allegation, and annoying the panel makes no sense at this stage. Or is it that the AAP leadership is already seeing the writing on the wall and preparing a counter-offensive in advance? The third is that it gives the people an impression that the AAP does not trust democratic institutions. There has never been an instance of a ruling party seeking to discredit the Election Commission of India on the floor of the House in this fashion. The AAP Government went to the ridiculous extent of convening a special session of the Assembly merely to demonstrate its technological prowess on an EVM-like machine. What is amazing is that a party which has emerged out of a people’s movement, should so miserably fail to read the public mood. Kejriwal and group ought to have picked the straws in the wind soon after the AAP’s debacle in the Rajouri Garden by-poll, where the party’s candidate forfeited his deposit in a constituency it had comprehensively won less than three years ago. If not then, they should have read the writing on the wall after the Municipal Corporation of Delhi election results were out. But there is no remedy if a patient remains in denial of his illness. The Delhi Assembly election is still three years away and the AAP continues to have a brute majority of 66 in a House of 70. Perhaps that accounts for the party’s arrogance. The AAP Government may survive until then but it has already lost the people’s trust and its sheen. (The writer is a senior political commentator and public affairs analyst) Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs and views of ABP News Network Pvt Ltd.