On May 19, Nirmal Rajora, a 30-year-old blind woman from Keshopur in Delhi, stood amid a crowd of about 200 people outside Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s house. Ms. Rajora was eager to participate in Mr. Kejriwal’s janta durbar (public meet) by filing a complaint against the Delhi police.
Volunteers of the Aam Aadmi Party manned a barricade, vetting the arrivals before letting them inside. As Ms. Rajora explained her case, she was shepherded into a large meeting hall where bureaucrats from various departments — education, electricity, health, transport, police and others — met the petitioners. “My husband was murdered and I can tell you who did it and why,” Ms. Rajora told a Delhi police officer sitting behind a plastic table. “But the police wrote it off as suicide. His body was hanging from the ceiling. How could he do that? He was blind.”
Soon after being sworn in as the Chief Minister of Delhi in February, Mr. Kejriwal launched janta durbar, a continuation of his populist politics aimed at exposing corruption in public services. He announced on radio channels that people could call the government’s anti-corruption helpline. He beefed up the Delhi Secretariat’s grievance cell by deploying seven bureaucrats to monitor online complaints. And he dispatched a team of 20 volunteers to follow up on the status of unresolved complaints.
Mr. Kejriwal is accused of staying stuck in the protest mode, but it is part of an overall and essential strategy that the AAP leader has been using from the start: to collect as many complaints as possible and use them as an argument in political battles. At present, Mr. Kejriwal is caught in a fight with Delhi Lt. Governor Najeeb Jung, who he accuses of being a central government pawn. Mr. Kejriwal is unhappy with the limited control he has over Delhi. Whenever he tries to rein in the institutions that fall under federal control, Mr. Jung scuttles the advances. Apart from putting up a tough resistance to the central government, Mr. Kejriwal has lubricated the state machinery, which is effectively gathering evidence to support his thesis that the institutions run by the central government are inefficient and corrupt.
The grievance machinery
Mr. Kejriwal has a history of using complaints to build political capital. His aggressive advertising of the Delhi government’s grievance redressal bodies shows a certain continuity of the strategy he has used at different phases in his career — right from campaigning for the Right to Information to the Jan Lokpal Bill.
Mr. Kejriwal began his activism in the early 2000s with Parivartan, a non-profit he ran while still on the payrolls of the income tax department. He exhorted people with complaints against tax collectors to file petitions against them in court. He put up posters in government offices that read: “Are you facing a bribe problem? Contact Parivartan”.
After resigning his job and joining the RTI movement in 2006, Mr. Kejriwal set up another non-profit called Public Cause Research Foundation that again focussed on collecting complaints from people and filing RTI applications in government offices. Three years later, Mr. Kejriwal realised that corrupt officers had found new ways to stall the applications. By 2011, he gave up on the RTI Act altogether because the law didn’t have a clause to punish dishonest officers. By then, he had started fighting for Jan Lokpal, arguing that a strong anti-corruption body with wide-ranging powers could secure the integrity of all other laws. To instil that idea in the public, he sought Anna Hazare’s help to bring the masses together, at a time when people were angry with high-profile scams such as 2G and Commonwealth.
Down the years, whenever Mr. Kejriwal has felt trumped, he has sought signatures and petitions from the people to bolster his fights. In 2011, former Union Minister for Human Resources Development Kapil Sibal was a member of the government’s joint drafting committee for Lokpal, the first man to officially contact Team Anna after the April 2011 agitation. When the meetings failed, Mr. Kejriwal launched an attack on Congress leaders by holding ‘referendums’ in their parliamentary constituencies. After his team’s referendum in Chandni Chowk, then Mr. Sibal’s constituency, he announced that 85 per cent of voters preferred his version of Lokpal. Mr. Sibal responded with a jibe, “I am surprised it is not 100 per cent.” Although Mr. Kejriwal’s survey might not have been statistically rigorous, it landed on the front page of almost every newspaper.
Fighting for control
Today, Mr. Kejriwal faces the National Democratic Alliance at the Centre, which controls key institutions in Delhi. As he fights to get control over State departments run by the Centre, he has once again deployed his tried-and-tested strategy of compiling petitions and releasing data against the departments he seeks to control.
Since Mr. Kejriwal’s advertisement of his accountability measures, AAP ministers and workers have been claiming that most of the complaints they receive are against the Delhi police. They even shared data with The Hindu, which shows that of the 2,937 complaints received by the Chief Minister’s public grievance cell against the Delhi police, 49 per cent are pending and 36 per cent are overdue. This was compared to the education department, which comes under Mr. Kejriwal’s control, where only 11 per cent of the 780 complaints are pending and 2 per cent are overdue.
Swati Maliwal, who advises Mr. Kejriwal on public grievances, told The Hindu that sooner rather than later the police must come under the Chief Minister’s control. “We are getting horrible complaints against the police,” she said. “We know at the end of the day [that] people will blame us.”
By highlighting public grievances through big numbers, Mr. Kejriwal can blame the Centre for limiting the scope of his governance. Professor Ajit Jha, a former AAP member, doesn’t see any problem with this strategy. “His approach doesn’t violate any democratic norm,” he said. However, he is troubled by one fact: “I think some of his objectives are unacceptable. He has a financial budget of Rs. 40,000 crore; he must focus on that and solve people’s problems by using it judiciously”.
As for Ms. Rajora, Mr. Kejriwal’s strategy has given her hope that her husband’s killers will be punished. For this, she is preparing to make another journey to the Chief Minister’s house. The person behind the murder is pushing her to abandon the case. “He even offered me money. I turned it down; he has started threatening me. My life is in danger,” she told The Hindu . She hopes Mr. Kejriwal will order an inquiry. “Otherwise, it’ll be just like other government offices where you get nothing but a ‘receiving’ slip in return.”
