 |
| Is he a Phenomenon? |
Often in life you don’t have the luxury of
choice. If you vacate a space or create a market distortion or an anomaly, you
simultaneously create an opportunity for some one else to come and occupy that
space and benefit from that anomaly. So you have to fiercely protect your flanks at all times,
unless there is a strategic trade-off built in your conception.
It is precisely for this reason that the media
today, is unable to boycott Kejriwal or his party, despite the direct
insinuations that they have made on the former. While some high pitch anchoring
did try to condemn Kejriwal’s comments and subject him some negative press, the
fact remains, what he said about the media, cannot be wholly dismissed. There
is private investment in the media, there are interest groups, there are
alignments that lead to distortion, but as we know all too well, all involved
actors are in mode of perpetual denial of such dalliances.
As a fervent votary of the school of thought that
no allegation should ever be leveled against any body, institution or person
without empirical and speaking evidence, I have never liked the manner in which
Kejriwal and his party colleagues go about making allegations. But the truth is, if you set out to gather
credible evidence, then you lose the moment, and the power of that moment is
actually what lends relevance to a particular allegation.
One thing that Kejriwal understands fully well is
the pulse of the people of the middle class from which he himself hails. This
happens to be the most dis-advantaged class in an in-equitable democratic
society, as it bears the brunt of the taxation, is usually the recipient of the
brutal stick of the government in the case of non compliance, and continuously
craves for reason, transparency and semblance of sanity in the manner that the
money that it pays as taxes is spent or squandered.
While the middle class in any society is usually
the most disillusioned class and is willing to lap up any half-baked or half
proven theory of connivance or complicity between sections of government,
industry and media; it is also the class that dreams the most. It is to this
class that Narendra Modi managed to vend a dream and it is again this class to
which Kejriwal is managing to expose the distortion in the dream that Modi till
this day is managing to vend.
So while those at the receiving end of the AAP
allegations like the media today may fulminate on lack of hard facts on their
allegedly poor public probity, they lack the courage to proscribe this
phenomenon to oblivion or wipe him off their pages and air-time.
Yes, Kejriwal perhaps is not really a person. He
is a phenomenon that has rapidly captured the imagination of the burgeoning
middle class and the members of the lower class who are on the cusp and are
aspiring to enter the middle class. Talk to a taxi driver perpetually harassed
by the police, and you will feel the hope he has from the ilk of Kejriwal.
Kejriwal will prevail or fail depending on his organisational skills, the competence of his team and on the delivery of the promises that he has made.
But whether the person ie. Kejriwal prevails or not
the phenomenon shall surely prevail.
