If it is Delhi politics, there have to be dirty tricks

On Monday, the BJP feasted on the expose from an unknown AVAM (AAP Volunteer Action Manch), a self-professed splinter group of the AAP volunteers, alleging the party had betrayed public trust by accepting donations of alleged black money routed through fictitious shell companies.

The BJP fielded two Union ministers – Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal – hours later to virtually declare the AVAM expose as a verdict to puncture the halo of political honesty around the AAP. Both, however, stopped short of demanding that the "Modi sarkar" investigate the matter. On Tuesday, the BJP came out with advertisements on the basis of the AVAM’s gospel truth to corner the AAP further.

The AAP was left smarting under this sudden charge, an art the AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal had mastered to embarrass and grab eyeballs to suit his confrontational politics. He did this recently soon after the announcement of poll dates for Delhi early last month when he came out with an expose suggesting complicity of the Delhi BJP chief Satish Upadhyay’s with electricity distribution companies.

Kejriwal, rather the entire AAP, wanted the electorate to believe his expose as gospel truth against the BJP and its leadership seeking the reins of the government in the capital.

He has got a taste of the same medicine. Likewise, the BJP wants the electorate to believe the AVAM’s expose without question.

In both cases, neither side deemed it fit to stress the need for an inquiry to establish the charge beyond reasonable doubt.

If this is what is happening closer to Delhi Assembly elections, look at how a similar episode played out in the run-up to a much higher stake game of Lok Sabha elections. The Congress had jumped on an expose of web-portals - Cobrapost and Gulail – in November 2013 to pounce on the BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. The episode was popularly termed as "snoopgate" and the Congress wanted the national electorate to believe it as gospel truth minus the much needed verification.

It even threatened to add credibility to the expose by instituting a SIT for which it found it very hard to get a suitable and pliable man with past credibility to chair it.

The BJP had dubbed this entire episode ahead of the Lok Sabha elections as an exercise in dirty tricks by the Congress. Curiously, the AAP is now charging the ruling BJP of deploying its dirty tricks department to tarnish its image.

Given the fact that the Congress has learnt it the hard way that electorate kept its own counsel keeping "snoopgate" aside to deliver a verdict in the Lok Sabha, one hopes that the electorate of the capital will expose these "exposes" – either of the AAP or the BJP – to shape popular opinion.