Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party sure knows how to remain in news. Always. Decibel levels in the already chaotic capital have risen manifold since the advent of AAP into power.
Not a day passes without its Supremo hurling foul invective and abuse at the Prime Minister or other central leaders. Playing victim, Kejriwal pretends as if the world is out to get him, a good man fallen among crooks.
The truth, however, is quite contrary to his pretensions. He is as adept in playing the politics of deceit and hoodwinking as the best among the traditional politicians. Promises of new politics, a new beginning, were completely bogus. AAP is in the single-minded pursuit of power for its own sake.
And to attain power it is willing to do whatever older practitioners of party politics have been doing for decades. In sum, it is a mistake to trust AAP to play normative politics. Whether it is the use of black money, or the abuse of government funds for self-promotion, in a short span of time AAP has proved that it can outsmart the older players by most brazenly cutting moral and legal corners.
AAP is no different from, say, the Congress or the BJP. Period. Take the latest controversy in which it has embroiled itself but, typically, holds everyone else and not itself responsible. Appointment of 21 MLAs as parliamentary secretaries in a House of mere 70 members was in itself a constitutional atrocity.
Full-fledged States with the strength of the bicameral legislature running in several multiples of the total strength of the Delhi Assembly have not had as many parliamentary secretaries. Besides, there is a specific constitutional bar on the Delhi Government, a B-category State, having more than ten percent of its MLAs as ministers. In other words, Delhi can have seven ministers, including chief minister. And the same law also stipulates that Delhi can have only one parliamentary secretary and no more.
Now, why did Kejriwal appoint 21 when there was a specific prohibition against more than one parliamentary secretary? The truthful answer is that he feared that a number of AAP MLAs would join hands with the Prashant Bhushan-Yogendra Yadav duo whom he had expelled from the party last year for no particular reason than the fact that the two did not endorse his opportunistic, power-hungry politics.
In order to prevent a split in the AAP legislature party, Kejriwal dangled the carrot of parliamentary secretaries’ posts. Initially, he offered them monetary and other perquisites as well, but upon a public-spirited citizen challenging these appointments the said order was rescinded, though they were still provided office space in the Delhi Secretariat and a transport allowance.
Further, to avoid disqualification of the 21 parliamentary secretaries, Kejriwal had the Delhi Assembly amend the Delhi MLA (Removal of Disqualification) Act, 1997, exempting the office of parliamentary secretary from the ambit of ‘office of profit’ with retrospective effect. A few days ago, the President denied assent to the amendment Bill passed by the Delhi Assembly. The matter was now with the Election Commission which alone will decide whether the 21 parliamentary secretaries are in violation of the law and thus have forfeited their seats.
Disqualification for holding an office of profit now seems unavoidable for the 21 AAP MLAs appointed parliamentary secretaries in March last year soon after the co-founders of the party, Bhushan and Yadav and few others, were mercilessly ejected from AAP by the super-boss Kejriwal.
However, since the denial of assent by President Pranab Mukherjee, Kejriwal and other AAP megaphones have only blamed Modi, most laughably arguing that the PM does not want the Delhi Government to `work’, to allow parliamentary secretaries to ‘ensure that hospitals are running well, water and electricity supply is uninterrupted,’ etc.
Other such crude excuses have been touted to justify the profusion of official posts to the party legislators. Though such appointments in a number of other States too have proved controversial, but no other State has been so brazen and so unmindful of the constitutional provisions as to appoint nearly one-third of the party MLAs as parliamentary secretaries. Imposters of AAP swearing by the Constitution only open themselves to ridicule.
To blame the PM for its own failures and follies has now become second nature to Kejriwal and Co. The fate of parliamentary secretaries is in the hands of the Election Commission and, maybe, subsequently the higher courts. But the mendacity of Kejriwal prevents him to appreciate this simple point. He is bent on bending every institution to his arbitrary and selfish designs. This cannot be acceptable to the well-informed citizenry.
