MCD Election Results Ring the Death Knell for Arvind Kejriwal
Arvind Kejriwal is being pooh-poohed by every aam aadmi (common man) of India for whom he had formed his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
By Rakesh Raman
While explaining his law of gravity, the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton once said: “What goes up must come down.”
But how much? Newton didn’t explain. That part is now being explained by Arvind Kejriwal – the government servant-turned-activist-turned-protester-turned-politician-turned-chief minister – in the Indian state, Delhi.
Riding the shoulders of the social activist Anna Hazare, Kejriwal touched meteoric heights in a short span of his political career. But he fell down as fast as he went up, exactly as Newton suggested.
His gravity-defying rise in the past couple of years is now shifting to a catastrophic fall to a level that has no bottom. He is being pooh-poohed by every aam aadmi (common man) of India for whom he had formed his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
The AAP’s defeat today in the MCD election has once again proved the fact that its victory in the 2015 Delhi assembly election was only a fluke, as AAP has recently suffered similar defeats in Punjab and Goa elections.
The MCD election results declared today show that BJP is the most popular political outfit in Delhi and it is all set to throw the Kejriwal’s AAP out of the local political arena while the other major party Congress is already dead.
Despite allegations of massive corruption during the past 10 years of BJP rule in the MCD, Narendra Modi’s party got absolute majority in all the municipal corporations – North, South, and East – in the 272-seat civic body.
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Although Kejriwal hoped to win the MCD election, today’s results show that the people of Delhi have completely rejected him and his party because during the past 2 years, Kejriwal has ruined the city.
For example, today Delhi is the most polluted and perhaps the dirtiest city in the world. But Kejriwal’s Delhi government has not made any attempt to get the city cleaned. Plus, the people do not get drinking water in homes and electricity supply is erratic. Parking of vehicles is a painful irritant in the entire city.
Similarly, the education standard in Delhi is in a deplorable state. But Kejriwal and others in his government have been telling blatant lies about the quality of school education which has actually gone from bad to worse.
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Although Kejriwal won the election with the promise to weed out corruption from Delhi, the truth is that corruption is so rampant in almost every street of Delhi that Kejriwal and Delhi government have failed to check it.
Worse, Kejriwal’s own government is facing serious corruption charges. Last year, the lieutenant governor Najeeb Jung had set up an expert committee – called the Shunglu Committee – to examine over 400 files for financial and administrative irregularities committed by Kejriwal’s government.
While the Shunglu Committee had submitted its report in November last year, it is stated that the report has found serious cases of fraud, cheating, and misappropriation of funds in Kejriwal’s Delhi government.
With all these failures, Kejriwal knows that it is the beginning of his end in the political battlefield. His defeat in the MCD election is just an indicator of the future debacle that Kejriwal is expected to face.
By Rakesh Raman, who is a government award-winning journalist and runs free school for deserving children under his NGO – RMN Foundation.
