The list of star campaigners issued by the AAP has the wife of Arvind Kejriwal, the incarcerated chief minister of Delhi, on the very top, followed by Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann and other party leaders. The list was drawn up by Kejriwal in prison. Thus, yet another party becomes a “family property”. Sunita Kejriwal, a former revenue service officer, has had no previous political experience. By dint of the fact that she is Kejriwal’s wife, she would now boss over the party that had come into being in the wake of the heady anti-corruption campaign spearheaded by the simple-minded activist Anna Hazare. The manipulative Kejriwal, felled by his own devious operations, ought not to now hesitate to nominate his wife as chief minister. His continuing as chief minister is highly untenable. If the Constitution is silent on this it is because the founding fathers could not even in their wildest dreams have visualised a situation in which a high functionary of the state would be in prison on corruption charges. Exploiting the silence of the statute for clinging to chief ministership would inevitably cause the Lt Governor of Delhi to recommend President’s Rule, something the ruling BJP is keen to avoid in order to deny the AAP manipulator an opportunity to play victim. What a fall for a self-styled crusader who had set out to cleanse the political system!
