By Amulya Ganguli
Ever since she was denied the police commissioner’s post in Delhi in 2007 by a Congress government, Kiran Bedi has been bent on getting the better of the (no longer) Grand Old Party. Now, finally, her ambition may be fulfilled if she can become Delhi’s chief minister, courtesy the BJP, for which she is alleged always to have had a soft corner.
But, there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip. No one knows if she will have the last laugh or the Congress. For a start, the fact that the feisty former cop shied away from a presidential-style TV debate with her former comrade in the Anna Hazare movement, Arvind Kejriwal, is a sign that she is not wholly confident of her prospects. As such, she didn’t want her “lightweight” intellectual credentials, to quote the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Yogendra Yadav, to be tested by another perennially aggressive combatant.
There are reasons for her to feel nervous. For instance, she cannot be unaware that her nomination for the chief minister’s post hasn’t been welcomed by all in the BJP. The choice made by Narendra Modi and his Man Friday, Amit Shah, is an admission of the party’s bare cupboard where talent is concerned. Evidently, the duo found that there is no one in the Delhi BJP who can pose a credible challenge even to a self-proclaimed anarchist like Kejriwal, whose penchant for theatrics got the better of him during his short-lived stint as the chief minister.
It must have been obvious to Modi, who virtually runs the party via Amit Shah, that the articulate “muffler man”, as Kejriwal has been dubbed in the media, cannot be jolted by unprepossessing apparatchiki like Vijay Goel and Jagdish Mukhi. In fact, the AAP’s ploy of putting up posters on auto-rickshaws of a young Kejriwal and an aging Mukhi as possible chief ministers apparently persuaded the BJP to field an outsider even if it meant breaking the rigid mould of a cadre-based party.
For the time being, the BJP’s organizational discipline may prevent any overt sign of discontent. But, any indication that Bedi’s induction hasn’t made a major difference to the BJP’s prospects in the sense that the party will only manage to scrape through with a bare majority will bring the internal rumbles to the surface. At such a time, her authoritarian thanedar-style of functioning, as a BJP member said, will be held against her.
Indeed, the severity of her ways is a major disadvantage and may have been the reason why she never went along with Kejriwal after he broke away from Anna because of an innate unwillingness to play second fiddle. It was also the probable reason why she never rose to be the police commissioner since senior bureaucrats of the time thought her to be too “outspoken and radical”. Since her capability of being a team player is in doubt, she may well prove to be a square peg in the BJP’s round hole.
If the BJP falters with the AAP running it close on February 10, then it will not only be Bedi who will be in trouble, but also Modi and Amit Shah. In a way, they have invested a great deal of faith in Bedi’s ability to swing the middle class voters, and particularly the women, towards the BJP. Any hint that even a maverick like Kejriwal with a muddled ideology, who apparently regards governance as a continuation of street-level declamatory politics, is able to act as a breaker to the Modi wave cannot but expose Bedi as a liability.
In that event, her critics will say that opportunism was the reason for it undermined her trustworthiness. Her political journey began in the days when she chanted, Anna is India, India is Anna, and performed a “gunghat dance” with a veil on the stage with Anna in a “distasteful” , in the words of the well-known jurist, Harish Salve, attempt to mock politicians. Now, the crusader from Ralegan Siddhi has been forgotten because of her ardour for Modi, who has “the world’s most beautiful face”.
That the Modi wave is not as powerful as it once was evident from the lacklustre show which the BJP put up during the prime minister’s rally in Delhi on January 10. There have been indications earlier, too, in Maharashtra and Jharkhand that the BJP is unable to secure a majority on its own in the state legislatures despite Modi’s campaigns. The long time which the BJP took to opt for the Delhi polls after first trying to acquire a majority with the help of defectors showed that it was nervous about a contest even against someone who was advised by Modi to go to the jungles to join the Naxalites.
For the average onlooker, the battle between “AK-49”, another of Modi’s jibes against Kejriwal, and Bedi, whose calls to Anna have not been answered – “sometimes he was sleeping and sometimes he was taking rest” – will be one of the most riveting contests in recent months. (IPA Service)