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The Truth about Arvind Kejriwal
Markandey Katju
15 January at 10:38 ·
The Truth about Arvind
Kejriwal
Many people have said that
I have some personal grudge against Kejriwal,
and that is why I hate him. So let me reply.
I do not personally know
Mr. Kejriwal, I have never met him, and have
never sought any favour from him ( this can be
confirmed from him ). So where is the question
of my harbouring any grudge against him ?.
Yes, I hate him, not for
personal reasons, but because he is a total
fraud, a charlatan, a humbug, a trickster, and a
mountebank, with superlative capacity,
unequalled by any other Indian politician of
today, to dupe and hoodwink the people on a
massive scale, and it is time now that such
frauds and inveiglers be exposed, otherwise the
Indian people will continue to be made suckers.
How does one explain the
Kejriwal phenomenon ?
Here is a man who a few
years back before the Anna Hazare agitation in
Delhi was unknown, but has now come out of the
blue and is in the limelight. In this article I
will try to explain.
AAP came to power in
February 2015 with a landslide victory because
people in Delhi, as elsewhere in India, were
disgusted with the prevailing politics, and
wanted a new kind, with leaders honest and
dedicated to solving the people's problems.
Kejriwal was projected as an epitome of honesty,
a messiah, a modern Moses who will lead the
people of Delhi into a land of milk and honey.
I have not heard anything
against Kejriwal's personal financial integrity,
but then one never heard anything against
Hitler's financial integrity too. There was
never any allegation that Hitler amassed a
fortune, and in fact he died penniless. Yet he
did great harm to Germany.
I am not comparing Kejriwal
to Hitler in other respects. All I am saying is
that being personally financially honest is not
enough.
After the February 2015
elections, truth started dawning gradually on
the people. It became evident that Kejriwal has
a dictatorial mindset, which cannot tolerate
dissent. After the victory in the Delhi
elections he has developed megalomaniac
tendencies, and surrounded himself with
chamchas. One of the first steps he took was to
unceremoniously kick out the Bhushans and
Yogendra Yadav, since they objected to his
giving MLA tickets to some shady elements (
perhaps because the latter contributed huge sums
to the AAP coffers ). He then allocated a
whopping Rs. 536 crores ( 21 times of last years
allocation ) in the Delhi budget to self
promoting ads. And to keep his flock together he
raised the salaries of Delhi MLAs several times.
All this resulted in a
rapid drop of the popularity of AAP and
Kejriwal. Many former ardent Kejriwal supporters
told me that they are now totally disillusioned
with AAP.
The truth is that Kejriwal
has no solution to the real problems of the
people--massive poverty, massive unemployment,
massive malnourishment, almost total lack of
healthcare, etc.
So what does our friend do
to restore his sagging image and keep grabbing
the headlines ? He resorts to stunts and
gimmicks. He has devised a beautiful modus
operandi to befool the public, which may be
explained.
He starts a scheme, which
is really a stunt, and people of Delhi ( who,
like people everywhere, are mostly a bunch of
gullible, emotional fools ), will initially clap
loudly and follow him, like the children
following the Pied Piper of Hamelin or a Sapnon
ka Saudagar. Examples are car free day, going on
bicycle ( for which arrangements are made to
televise it widely, ) lokpal ( which some call
Jokepal ), etc. Later, when the shine and
glimmer start wearing off, and people see
through the realities and start facing the
difficulties caused by the scheme, and hostility
to it begins, he abandons it and starts a new
scheme ( i.e. a new stunt ) and the same
rigmarole and drama begins again.
To give the latest example,
the Delhiites, who had initially supported the
harebrained odd even scheme, thinking it to be
the panacea for their problem of air pollution,
are now realizing the immense hardships it is
causing, with no significant drop in the air
pollution ( since car pollution is hardly 1 or
2% of the total air pollution, as the IIT Kanpur
report points out ). So opposition to the scheme
was growing day by day. People have to go for
work daily, and not only on odd or even days,
and public transport is woefully inadequate.
Realizing this, our Sapnon
ka Saudagar has abandoned the scheme and started
a new headline grabbing stunt. He has announced
the end of the management quota in admissions to
private nursery schools.
http://indianexpress.com/…/50-per-cent-extra-seats-opened-…/
The people of Delhi will
again clap, praise their hero and shout ' Sieg
Heil ' for their Superman, just as Germans did
in the 1930s. All this will of course be widely
projected by our TRP driven media.
But public opinion is
fickle, like the Roman mob at Caesar's funeral (
see Shakespeare's ' Julius Caesar ' ), or the
bloodthirsty Paris mob at Charles Darnay's trial
( see Dickens' ' A Tale of Two Cities '), and
after some time the same people who were
cheering will be jeering, as the truth dawns on
them, which is this :
Private institutions run
for profits, not for charity. So the private
nurseries may follow the new rules for a short
while, but obviously not for long.
Also, if a Minister, Judge,
bureaucrat, police officer, income tax official,
municipal official, etc asks for an admission,
can the school manager decline ? If he does,he
is likely to face a lot of harassment
So in no time the
management will find out a way of subverting the
scheme, and it will remain on paper only
Then Mr. Kejriwal will
forget it and begin some other gimmick or caper.
He will keep hopping from stunt to stunt,
thinking that in this way the people can be
deceived for ever.
His latest stunt was his
rally in Punjab, where he put on a yellow
turban, obviously to look like Sikh, and began
his speech by shouting ' Bole so Nihaal ', and
then said he will not let a single farmer commit
suicide. “Farmers in Delhi were given a
compensation of Rs 50,000 per hectare when they
lost their crop. I did not let a single farmer
commit suicide. Here, farmers are killing
themselves as they are not compensated,” . He
also said he would check corruption by getting
the Badals arrested and sacking those seeking
bribes — “Even if my son indulges in corruption,
I will throw him out.”. And I am sure many
gullible Punjabis will be carried away by this
rhetoric and vote for AAP.
But Mr. Kejriwal, there is
a proverb in English " You cannot fool all the
people all the time "
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