Who said three days ago,
"They may kill us!"?
Not Indian jawans keeping vigil
at LoC, thinking of Pak military and worried about their families back home. It was Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal of
AAP in a You Tube video, saying he and other leaders of his party could be killed on the orders of prime minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. The charge really looms over Modi whose image and nationwide appeal, not Shah's, brought BJP to power at
the Centre and dashed Kejriwal's dreams of becoming prime minister through the 2014
national elections.
Kejriwal further said Modi
might get it done because of ‘frustration’ with Kejriwal, stemming from – as Kejriwal
believed these reasons existed - AAP’s victory over BJP in the 2015 Delhi assembly
elections, AAP’s present good work in Delhi and its growth in a
few other states. The charge and its
explanation are outright funny and downright silly. A newspaper which generally
applauds Modi front-paged the news saying the Delhi chief minister was
'ranting', while another one which is generally critical of Modi shunted
the news to its inside pages saying Kejriwal 'claimed' to feel threatened. This
is a sample of both supporters and opponents of Modi not taking Kejriwal's declared
apprehension seriously. That is healthy in the watching of public
affairs. What, then, is the need for
anyone to talk about this further?
Kejriwal is a chief minister functioning
from the national capital which houses the prime minister's office too.
He wants Delhi to be made a full-fledged state with greater powers of
administration. And he wants to become prime minister soonest – so he expressed doubts in
his video speech if the country was safe in Modi's hands. When that man says publicly that the country's prime minister might
get him killed out of sheer political rivalry, it needs to be discussed. Modi
may just ignore Kejriwal over this issue, in a politically wise stance.
But in the public domain Kejriwal must hear others.
Assume that Kejriwal really feels
his life could be shortened through Modi's directives. Then it means a feeling that Modi
would want it enacted before his current tenure as prime minister ends, which
is about 3 years from now. Reason: if Kejriwal lives long enough to face the
next Lok Sabha elections in 2019 Modi will fear losing out to Kejriwal in those
elections and hence he would prefer Kejriwal to be out of the scene by then – so would Kejriwal
want us to believe. Kejriwal,
who thinks his popularity is swelling, should also imagine that Modi's frustration
with Kejriwal would rise day by day, and that Modi would want his wishes
fulfilled at the earliest. All these naturally flow from Kejriwal's direct allegations. Let us go further.
Lives of elected political
leaders all over the world are rather unsafe, whatever their political
beliefs. If they are left unprotected any madman could fire a shot at
them or throw a knife or a bomb at them. The attacker may not always act
on the orders of a political rival and could himself be insane. He could also be a disgruntled member of the same
political group or party as the targeted leader. So the state machinery should monitor threats
to the lives of all political leaders and give them protection when needed,
without talking much about it. Sometimes
the best of protection by the state may not also be good enough, when it would
be a sad day for the whole country whoever the victim. Leaving all this aside, as a mortal any
leader could breathe his last owing to an organ failure or other ailment. Kejriwal wants us to believe that if he or
any of his party leaders leave this world for
any reason, in the next three years or later, Modi should
automatically become the prime suspect of a plot behind it. This is a vicious hope.
The world knows about a country where a similar charge by a chief minister of a region against a person holding
a higher rank and wielding a huge authority could be quite credible. But the man under such a death threat
will know that if he speaks about it publicly the threat could be more surely carried into effect. That is Pakistan. Kejriwal knows he lives in a far safer and
better governed India, where the judiciary functions independently, the rulers
are not oppressive and the military is not all-powerful.
Kejriwal has touched a new low from a high position. If a municipality
chairman in India makes a charge like Kejriwal has done, it is level one
low. When a chief minister in the
country does it, he reaches level two low.
If, God forbid, any prime minister of the nation will ever do it, it is
the ultimate low. The higher the
position a person occupies, a notch higher is the dignity he should assume and the
responsibility he should show in words and action. The reason is this. A person among the last ranks of an
administration and doing misdeeds at the workplace does not easily infect all
others in the set-up, unless many others do it by themselves and there is no
action to check any of them. But if the
one person who is at the top does things wrongly, irresponsibly or corruptly, though
deviously, others down the line will follow him and his clever ways. So Kejriwal has sent a wrong signal to political
leaders, established or upcoming, that the way to keep one’s place in politics
and engage with political opponents is through wickedly dramatized falsehood. What he said may be legally a non-event, but is
morally poisonous in public life. We
should hope that the public spot it.
True, Kejriwal led his AAP to
win 67 out of 70 seats in the last Delhi assembly elections. He fought against the campaign of Modi, a
serving prime minister, and won to become Delhi’s chief minister. He deserves a lot of credit for his victory. No doubt Modi should look at his defeat with
humility, and defeat also naturally helps in that. Kejriwal too should take his electoral success with humility, even more of it for the victor, but so far he has given
no proof of it.
The Delhi chief minister has
quickly given proof on one thing - that his dubious motives have begun inspiring others, at least
within his party. A day after Kejriwal
released his video speech charging Modi, Asim Ahmed Khan who is a sitting AAP lawmaker
of Delhi – who was a former minister in Kejriwal’s cabinet but dropped later on charges of corruption – told newsmen that Kejriwal and his aides
had threatened to kill Khan because, as Khan claimed, the lawmaker had
materials to ‘expose’ Kejriwal. No
prizes to anyone for guessing that Khan learnt a new trick from Kejriwal, just wished
to blacken the name of his estranged leader and so alleged that Kejriwal gave
out a death threat. Of all persons, Kejriwal knows that his troubled party man is on a calculated foul play, posing as a victim. Because Kejriwal knows himself.
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Copyright
© R. Veera Raghavan 2016
