THE SUN IS SETTING as the roadshow of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in Ludhiana slowly makes its way towards the culmination point. It is still intensely hot, but there is a huge crowd, eager to catch a glimpse of Kejriwal. The yellow and blue flags of the Aam Aadmi Party jostle for space as people wave at the AAP leader and many of them hold aloft their mobile phones to take pictures and record videos.
Kejriwal is in a black SUV, accompanied by the AAP candidate from Ludhiana, Ashok Parashar Pappi. He is standing up in the vehicle, looking out of the sunroof. A loudspeaker announces his arrival, playing the song Mera Rang De Basanti Chola, which is associated with Bhagat Singh. Kejriwal has often mentioned that the freedom fighter is among his idols. At regular intervals, a voice tells the public in Punjabi that “your favourite leader, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, is in your midst”.
Someone from the crowd hands Kejriwal a framed portrait of Bhagat Singh, which he holds above his head. A while later, a mace is handed to Pappi, to be given to Kejriwal. The AAP leader’s devotion to Lord Hanuman is well known, and the mace is the deity’s main weapon. As the roadshow approaches its destination, Kejriwal climbs out of the sunroof and stands on top of the vehicle. The mace is handed to him. He holds it aloft and launches into slogans, starting with “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” and following it up with cries of “Inquilab Zindabad”, “Vande Mataram”, “Jo Bole So Nihal”, “Jai Bajrang Bali” and ends with “Jai Shri Ram”.
Then in his typical, unpretentious manner of engaging with people, he says, “I missed you all when I was in jail. Did you miss me?” When the people say yes, he teasingly says, “I hope you are not lying.” He then shouts out, “I love you”, and blows a kiss to the crowd.
“They put me in jail. Do I look like a thief to you? Do I look corrupt?” he asks. He then accuses Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Union government of targeting him because they are afraid of the work done by the AAP governments in Delhi and Punjab. “Modi ji is afraid of our work. We gave you free electricity. We have set up mohalla clinics for you. We are in the process of improving the school infrastructure,” he says.
The AAP’s main rival in Punjab is the Congress. However, the focus of Kejriwal’s attack is Modi and the BJP. “I have come to ask you to give the AAP all 13 seats in Punjab. We have to unseat Modi who did not allow farmers from Punjab to go to Delhi. He got nails punched into the highway and blocked the roads with bulldozers so that you could not enter Delhi. We will not tolerate this kind of tanashahi (dictatorship),” he says.
Kejriwal’s charm offensive as a campaigner is not a new phenomenon. He is the AAP’s biggest draw primarily because of his ability to engage with the people. He talks to them in a language that is uncomplicated and he comes across as somebody they can relate to. And the schemes of the AAP governments in Delhi and Punjab are projected as ‘Kejriwal’s guarantees’.
It was exactly this connect of Kejriwal with the people which the party’s poll campaign had missed after he was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on March 21 in connection with the alleged scam in the now-scrapped excise policy of the Delhi government. The arrest took place just a few days after the Election Commission had announced the schedule of the Lok Sabha elections. On May 10, the Supreme Court granted Kejriwal interim bail till June 1, allowing him to campaign.
The 55-year-old leader, after spending close to two months in jail, has made the most of the reprieve he got from the apex court. According to his party colleagues, his presence has made a huge difference. Second-rung leaders had held the fort in his absence, balancing organisational responsibilities with campaigning. Kejriwal’s wife, Sunita, had stepped into the public sphere for the first time to be the link between her husband and the outside world. She became the party’s lead campaigner in Kejriwal’s absence.
“The interim bail had a huge uplifting effect not just on the AAP’s campaign, but also on the INDIA bloc overall. The narrative of the INDIA parties that the Modi government has upset the level-playing field by targeting opposition leaders has found validation with the Supreme Court questioning the timing of the arrest. It is a moral victory for us,” says senior AAP leader Jasmine Shah.
Setting the tone for his vigorous campaign, Kejriwal was unsparing in his attack on Modi a day after his release. Addressing workers at the party headquarters, he accused the prime minister of following a ‘One Nation, One Leader’ agenda. He attempted to set the cat among the pigeons by asking who will replace Modi when he turns 75, referring to purported retirement age set by the BJP. He followed the scathing attack on Modi with his 10 guarantees of free electricity, quality education, Mohalla clinics for every locality, simplifying GST, freeing land occupied by China, full statehood for Delhi, minimum support price for farmers, two crore jobs annually, breaking BJP’s ‘washing machine’ and scrapping the Agnipath scheme.
Kejriwal has held roadshows and public meetings, first in Delhi and Haryana and later in Punjab. He held a joint news conference with Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow, and travelled to Mumbai and Jamshedpur to campaign for INDIA bloc candidates. The focus of Kejriwal’s campaign has been his fight against tanashahi (dictatorship), and he claims that if Modi comes back to power, the Constitution will be in peril and there could be no more elections. According to AAP leaders, the tanashahi narrative has resonated with the people and it takes forward the ‘Jail Ka Jawab Vote Se (reply to jail with votes)’ campaign the party had launched after Kejriwal’s arrest.
According to an AAP leader, Kejriwal flung himself headlong into the elections after coming out of jail. “When we met him, our first concern was his health and well-being because he had lost weight. But he promptly changed the topic, asking us about the election roadmap, and a rough calendar of his campaign in Delhi, Haryana and Punjab was drawn up,” says the leader.
Also, the strategy has been to not play the victim card. Rather Kejriwal wants his arrest to be seen as a political struggle against ‘dictatorship’. The arrest and its aftermath has brought many challenges for the AAP, but it has also provided it with an opportunity to turn the entire focus of the campaign on Kejriwal.
AAP leaders feel that after the arrest, the sympathies of the shifting voter in Delhi, who would vote for Kejriwal in the assembly elections and the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls, were with him. The reason for this, according to them, is that a majority of Delhi’s voters are beneficiaries of the AAP government’s schemes. They say the dictatorship argument has resonated with these voters.
Kejriwal attended nearly 30 events including roadshows, rallies and public meetings in Delhi, campaigning for AAP and Congress candidates. There were teething troubles though, in the effort to get the workers of the two parties, bitter rivals otherwise, to work together. And there was also the challenge of making supporters of the AAP vote for the Congress and vice-versa.
“The workers automatically started feeling energetic after he joined the election campaign. Everyone wanted to see him and talk to him. They were also concerned about his health,” says Kuldeep Kumar, the AAP candidate from East Delhi constituency.
According to Abhay Kumar Dubey, professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, the AAP-Congress alliance appears to have worked well in Delhi. “This is the first time the saffron party had to face an alliance in Delhi. This could result in consolidation of anti-BJP votes,” he says.
The BJP had to go back to the drawing board and change the contours of its campaign. From seeking votes on the basis of the Modi government’s welfare schemes and Modi’s image as a leader who has delivered on his promises, the party’s campaign shifted to targeting Kejriwal and the AAP on the issue of corruption.
“The Supreme Court made it very clear that Kejriwal can go neither to the chief minister’s office nor to Delhi secretariat. He cannot talk to any officials or witnesses about the scam. It is a matter of huge shame that the elected chief minister of Delhi has, on a bail of Rs50,000, come out for a specified period of time,” says BJP leader Manoj Tiwari, who contested from North East Delhi.
Apart from Delhi, Kejriwal needs to address the challenge in Punjab, where the AAP is in power since 2022. It is contesting all 13 seats in the state on its own. The Congress, the AAP’s alliance partner in Delhi, is its main rival in Punjab.
The multi-cornered polls in Punjab are a test of the Bhagwant Mann government’s popularity. In 2019, the Congress had won eight seats and the AAP one, while the BJP and the Akali Dal had won two seats each. On May 26, a day after Delhi voted, Kejriwal shifted his campaign to Punjab, where the polls will be held in the last phase on June 1. He participated in at least three public events in a day, including roadshows and town hall meetings.
Kejriwal’s interim bail was in the news for the wrong reasons, too. His long-time party colleague and Rajya Sabha MP Swati Maliwal made the shocking allegation that she was beaten up by his aide Bibhav Kumar at the chief minister’s residence. It gave the BJP ammunition to attack Kejriwal and his party, even as Maliwal openly criticised her party for not standing by her. The AAP says the controversy was orchestrated by the BJP for political gain.
“If we look carefully at the alleged incident, a very shocking thing comes to light. The Delhi Police, which comes under the BJP-ruled Centre, has acted as an interested party from the very beginning,” says Delhi cabinet minister Saurabh Bharadwaj. “Thousands of calls are made to the numbers 100 and 112 everyday. But immediately after Maliwal called 112, the news was shared with the media.”
The chief minister has demanded an impartial investigation and said it would not be fair for him to take sides since there were two versions of what had happened.
Kejriwal’s return to jail is imminent, with the Supreme Court refusing to list his bail extension plea. But with his 20 days of blistering campaign, he has set the political temperature soaring. And he may have made a big difference to the INDIA bloc’s poll prospects.