Dark night ahead: Kejriwal is Joker to Batman Modi

This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.

- Joker, The Dark Knight

Arvind Kejriwal is the Joker in BJP’s Dark Knight. No prizes for guessing who Batman is.

Delhi, of course, is Gotham City, where the two chase each other, but avoid a full-blown clash every single time, by a whisker, for another face-off, another day.

Narendra Modi is the prime minister of India and holds four other portfolios. Arvind Kejriwal is the chief minister of Delhi, but holds no portfolio. He has left governance to his able colleagues.

Government work could well eat into the precious time he would rather utilise in politics. That affords him political oxygen, air-time, disproportionate to his status and strength.

From online jibes to offline diatribes, Kejriwal’s ongoing project is to project himself as the man who can match Modi, now that the Congress is on a slide and the rest are divided and distant.

He turned his weakness, being chief minister of a half-state, into a strength. The statute doesn’t give him enough room to manoeuvre. Yet, he deliberately throws his fists around knowing that the books and the L-G wouldn’t allow them. And they don’t.

**You have nothing, nothing to threaten me** — Joker

**Narendra Modi, I am not scared of you. You don’t know what I’m made of** — Arvind Kejriwal

He then goes medieval on how Modi isn’t allowing him to work. That Modi is scared of his Aam Aadmi Party.

He mixes this rant with letters dripping with sarcasm that he writes to his constitutional boss, the lieutenant-governor, Najeeb Jung. Some find this amusing, others deplorable, but he doesn’t care.

He hasn’t appointed a Lokpal, the first thing he said he would do. But he appointed an ACB of his own, has had nasty public fights with the lieutenant-governor over officers that he had no right to appoint.

He knows the rules of the game, violates them and then cries foul when shown the yellow/red card, changing the nature of the game by making a game out of it.

**What doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger**! — Joker

He made 21 of his MLAs parliamentary secretaries. This is way beyond what a small state like Delhi can have. Also, he appointed them first and created these positions later. Since it was hardly legal, he passed a bill with retrospect effect.

The president rejected the bill. And he got another opportunity to maul Modi’s image. You can safely predict more of this as elections draw near in Punjab and Goa, two states his party has made significant inroads in.

In neither, he has a leader.

He is the face of the party, and has to show up on TV screens, when he isn’t showing up in real. This is so much like Modi, who becomes the face at a place where BJP has the cadre, but no presiding padre.

Kejriwal cannot afford people of Punjab and Goa thinking of him as the chief minister of Delhi, what he actually is.

**You, you complete me**! — Joker

**Even when Modiji sleeps, he sees me in his dream** — Arvind Kejriwal

Hence, he drops the projector lower to the ground and the shadow looks larger. The man who can take on Modi. The man who can be tough and nasty if needed and call names like no other. The man with balls, 56-inch chest or not. The presumptive alternative.

The ground reality is different. Even the reviled and on-the-decline Congress’s Rahul Gandhi has 44 MPs to AAP’s 4. Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav and the like are politically much bigger figures than Kejriwal but they all are just chief ministers. Not Arvind Kejriwal, though.

**Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just do things** — Joker

Some have called his political pawing, madness. There is, however, a method if not a plan, to this madness.

His irreverent, no-holds-barred disrespect of authority echoes well with the generation that detests authority. Politicians have degraded themselves and their calling over the years and Arvind Kejriwal has emerged as the anti-politics politician.

That’s an oxymoronic situation to be in, but Arvind Kejriwal revels in it. He sends mixed signals, often one cancelling the other. All one is left with is the image of this man, who is a fighter.

We really don't know for what, but he fights.

He opposed communalism, casteism, corruption and cronyism to climb the ladder to the top. He is cynical enough to use them in a measured way.

He just called in a top BSES officer and humiliated him in Seelampur over power-cuts during Sehri and Iftar. This man can bring communalism into power-cuts.

He has his cronies, and his closest advisers are his caste men. There has been no major allegation of corruption in his time, but wherever there has been a whisper, he has drowned it in noise.

Gopal Rai has just quit as the transport minister. Expect some noise. If things get hot, he would skewer Modi in a press conference. He is not an anarchist and he has said it a couple of times. But in his heart, he knows a little anarchy can be a good thing. So.

**Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair**! — Joker

We can just sit back and enjoy the show as Modi refuses to entertain Kejriwal and Kejriwal brings all the entertainment. Horror is a popular genre after all. Why So Serious?