Delhi polls: Kiran Bedi plan has backfired, can BJP stop the Kejri-wave now?
The Kiran Bedi missile has backfired and the BJP is now in damage control mode. If reports are to be believed, the party has requested the ever-reliable Arun Jaitley to take charge of the Delhi campaign, both in terms of the strategy on the ground as well as containing the bad media coverage the party has been getting because of Bedi's faux pas. Not just Jaitley, other dependable BJP leaders like Sushma Swaraj, Jagat Prakash Nadda and Piyush Goyal are being deployed for the Delhi Assembly election campaign. Bedi has apparently been asked to restrict her statements to women's safety issues. The question now no longer is whether Kiran Bedi can take on Arvind Kejriwal, it is whether the BJP can contain the damage in time, with polling day just ten days away.
On January 15 when Bedi joined the BJP, she was termed as the party's masterstroke against Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party. Only a few days earlier, Kejriwal had drawn first blood in the Delhi elections by accusing Delhi BJP chief Satish Upadhyay of having business links with power distribution companies. The BJP needed to pull off something special against Kejriwal and their answer was Bedi, his erstwhile colleague. For a few days it appeared to be working. Bedi was seen as clean, energetic and decisive, a refreshing change from the moribund Delhi BJP and a contrast to the "anarchist" Kejriwal. AAP too, couldn't quite figure out how to handle the former Team Anna member. Much to their embarrassment, Shanti Bhushan declared that Bedi would be a better chief minister than Kejriwal, and the AAP chief's own reluctance in directly attacking Bedi didn't help matters.
But then something happened: Bedi began to self-destruct.
In two TV interviews, she was seen running away from tough questions, in the process snatching away the "bhagoda" tag from Kejriwal, who was only too glad to get rid of it. To drive home the point that Bedi is afraid of facing questions, Kejriwal challenged her to a debate. Bedi refused. But then her own tweets during the Lok Sabha elections on how leaders of political parties should have a presidential style debate, came back to haunt her.
Then came her ridiculous statement that if Kejriwal wants an invitation for the Republic Day parade, he must join the BJP. Even the BJP's otherwise assertive spokespersons were at a loss of words on how to defend this latest faux pas from the party's chief ministerial candidate in Delhi.
Her latest interview aired on Tuesday evening, with NDTV India's Ravish Kumar, seems to have been the last straw.
At the heart of Brand Kiran Bedi lies the legend that many years ago, she towed away the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's car for violating traffic rules. In the interview, Bedi admitted that that it wasn't she but sub-inspector Nirmal Singh who towed away the car. And it turns out Indira Gandhi wasn't even travelling in the car.
It would still have been fine had this been a legend spread by the fans of the former policewoman. But no, Bedi had proudly displayed it in her twitter profile as well. In the very next sentence she mentions that she was voted as the most trusted woman. "Trusted" is ironic given that her very previous sentence was fiction.
In the same interview, Bedi committed another goof-up, which didn't get noticed as much. When asked about the regularisation of unauthorised settlements, Bedi said that her government will follow the "Maharashtra model" of regularisation, something that is to the credit of the Congress and the NCP, which had ruled the state from 1999 to 2014. One of the main USPs of Bedi as a chief ministerial candidate is her credibility on the issue of women's safety. But even on that, her answer was vague at best. She said even though the Delhi chief minister doesn't have control over the police, she will bring all the stakeholders together.
It is evident that Bedi is ill-suited to politics. Kejriwal appears to have learnt the ropes much better. Being a social activist with more than a decade of experience, he has a way with people. Though Bedi too runs an NGO, she is essentially a cop and being a cop, she doesn't have too much patience for the niceties of politics. She tried to make up for her inexperience through sycophancy, with statements like "BJP has the world's most beautiful face in Narendra Modi". Those who believe in the Bedi legend, see her as a tough, no-nonsense administrator and even they wouldn't like to see her sing panegyrics to get ahead in politics.
Let us face it, Bedi has very little charisma. She doesn't even have the genial, aunty-like charm that helped Sheila Dikshit maintain her sway over Delhi for 15 years. She is more like a tough headmistress who likes to mete out "murga" punishments to unsuspecting kids. Kejriwal in contrast is a street-fighter and a substantial chunk of Delhiites see him as "one of their own".
But one mustn't blame Bedi beyond a point. She is what she is and given her constraints, she is still trying her best. Somewhere the fault lies in the BJP's strategy. The party was being too clever by half by propping up Bedi to checkmate Kejriwal. But it's projection of Bedi was itself an admission of defeat in two ways. Firstly, it revealed the complete bankruptcy of the party's state unit. It neither had a leader nor a vision for the Delhi and its leaders were relying purely on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's charisma to catapult them into power. Secondly, the projection of Bedi was an acknowledgement of the popularity of the Anna Hazare agitation, of which Kejriwal was the mastermind. It was the BJP's way of admitting that the agitation had changed Delhi's politics and the only way it could succeed was to pick up one of its main protagonists.
Even though the pre-election surveys are suggestion that the AAP has an edge, the BJP can still pull through. They party can outspend the AAP many times over. Moreover, Modi's honeymoon period is still going strong and many people will vote for the party in his name. But as Henry Kissinger said, "the guerrilla wins if he doesn't lose". Kejriwal has already won.