How Arvind Kejriwal killed a bit of internal hypocrisy

The phrase of the season on social media has been "internal democracy". It is sufficiently pious for the politically correct, excessively attractive for opportunists, and a great stick for rebels and rivals to beat their opponents with. A strong chorus of BJP supporters, Congress sympathisers and AAP volunteers has derided Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal and echoed on Twitter and Facebook what AAP's Admiral L Ramdas, Yogendra Yadav and Shanti and Prashant Bhushan had been saying: There is no internal democracy in AAP and AK is an autocrat. And this is the reason, they say, why AAP is coming apart despite its dizzy success in the Delhi elections.

They are perhaps wrong. Indian politics has seen dizzy victories of political formations born out of mass movements before. It has also seen those experiments reduced to dust because of internal hypocrisy in the name of democracy. This context seems to be entirely missing in the conversation on social platforms.

Most people using social media today were born after 1977; many after 1988. Parallels are inevitable in history, and these are important dates to understand what is happening with AAP. Jayaprakash Narayan's movement against corruption and political arrogance of Indira Gandhi's regime captured the imagination of young leaders from across ideologies and brought them together under the Janata Party umbrella.

They overthrew the mighty Indira Gandhi in 1977, just as AAP, born out of a similar movement led by Anna Hazare, won Delhi twice within a year. Thanks to internal democracy - usually an euphemism for rampant indiscipline, unbridled ambition and refusal to see a shared goal - the first Janata experiment exploded in no time.

Again in 1988, VP Singh brought diverse political forces together as part of the Janata Dal experiment. Again, it bombed. There was too much of 'internal democracy'. Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Nitish Kumar, Sharad Yadav, Om Prakash Chautala and Deve Gowda, many of whom are long past their prime, are trying to pick up the shards many years later with a sputtering project to bring the Janata Parivar together.

Will tomorrow's AAP resemble today's Janata Parivar? Will Kejriwal, Bhushan, Yadav, Manish Sisodia, Mayank Gandhi and others be sitting many years later as greying "krantikaris" cobbling up a coalition for political relevance? We do not know and it is unfair to see the present strictly through the looking glass of the past.

But this moment, Kejriwal seems damned right. As a leader, you can't run a team in which your comrades are constantly sniping at you, harbouring premature dreams of being the CM of this state or the other, calling press conferences and engineering leaks to undermine you. In his book The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama reminds readers of the Hobbesian premise that "unregulated liberty in the state of nature leads to the state of war". It sounds apt for AAP. But a politically mature and quieter Kejriwal had to break out of his own polite charade of "internal democracy" and get down to spring cleaning. And that is good news for the party, in spite of the embarrassing drama unfolding every evening on national television and the social media.

However, once Kejriwal has clearly established who is the boss, he needs to spell out, at least loosely, a vision and carry a range of ideologies along. Parties like AAP and the Congress were born out of defining movements. The Congress had quickly established a well-defined chain of command and found in Jawaharlal Nehru a man who could wield authority and also carry diverse ideological strands along. Both the Congress and AAP do not have the luxury of a strong, well-defined ideological glue that the Left or the BJP enjoys. It takes a lot more to hold a more inclusive but abstract idea together. The Janata experiments failed to do that. Once the movements were over, nobody had an idea what to do with the idea.

Once Kejriwal is done setting his house in order, he could use a bit of internal democracy in the true sense to set a common vision for his party.