Arvind Kejriwal is singing a new song these days. “Ai dil hai mushkil jeena yahan, zara hatke, zara bachke….yeh hai Dilli meri jaan”.
Every night AK goes to sleep after jotting down a ‘To-Do’ list for the next day. What’s unusual in this? We all do this. But unlike each one of us, his each new day is a surprise for him. Just when he finished ticking off Yogendra Yadav from his list of worries, his dear old friend Somnath Bharti came from behind to scare AK out of his wits. No wonder then that Arvind Kejriwal starts his new day by first tearing off his To-Do list.
With the approaching winters, as his wife sits knitting new mufflers for him, Kejriwal can’t put a finger on why things are going so horrendously wrong for him. “Humse kya bhool hui, jo ye sazaa humka mili,” he poignantly asks his wife.
Just as he proved all political pundits and detractors wrong by majestically winning the Delhi assembly elections in 2015, he arrived home to find all gates to his kingdom locked. Naseeb Jung, who till now was just an answer to a UPSC question, had risen from the ashes like a Phoenix to fire a fresh salvo on a daily basis. I guess Mr Jung’s ‘To-Do’ list is an easier one because each day he has to just ask Arvind Kejriwal, “Hum AAP ke hain kaun? Batayea”!
AK is still looking for answers to that!
With Arvind Kejriwal in a combat mood, the entire AAP fraternity is enveloped in a battle mode. While AKs ‘Tu tu main main’ with the Lt Gov. of Delhi and BJP stalwarts added 50 years to the constitutional experts, the rest of the party continued to fight too, each at their own level. So used did they get to the squabbling, retorting and bickering that when they couldn’t find anyone else, they trained their guns on Kejriwal himself. So before AK could say, “Et tu Yogendra” or “Et tu Prashant”, they had disappeared into thin air.
Poor AK was left humming, “Bichad gaya har saathi, dekar pal do pal ka saath. Kis ko fursat hai jo thamey, deewane ka haath”.
Trust Punjabis to do the rescue act. Punjab and its electorate had given the ‘Balle balle’ to the party in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. So when Kejriwal scanned the Punjab landscape, he was happy. Par yahan bhi AK ki kismat kharab thi. Just as he thought of doing a Bhangra in Punjab with the dwindling SAD and Congress support, his Punjab cadre sprung a surprise. Each day a new voice of dissent. Each day a new voice of revolt. Each day a new expulsion. So quite like us, Arvind Kejriwal is a confused man. None of us know which is the real AAP, none of us know who is in the party. None of us remember who is out. So poor Arvind Kejriwal has to take a roll call each day to know who is in for the day and humming to himself, “Aa deke zaraa, kis main kitna hai dum…”
A Magsaysay award winner, a man who single handedly changed the tide of Indian politics, the first leader to talk of corruption with honesty and sincerity is a man on crossroads today. Maybe instead of watching ‘Nayak’ where Anil Kapoor wields the magic after becoming the CM for a single day, he should have watched ‘Rajniti’ where each leader cuts the throat of the other. Wrong choice of movie, Arvindji!
What endears AK to me is that he’s the only Indian leader who has jokes on his honesty. My favourite – Arvind Kejriwal is so honest that no woman has ever asked him, Do I look fat?
