RESEARCH

The politician used every past associate of his to climb the ladder of fame and success, and a large section of the journalistic fraternity agreed to be cheerleaders of his fake movement with initial help from the UPA government and waylaid RSS swayamsevaks   S ome days ago, Times Now went ballistic over a claim by Kumar Vishwas of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) chief ministerial candidate Kiran Bedi had a soft corner for the party she is now in even during the Jan Lokpal (JLP) movement of 2011. The claim sounded strange to this columnist who was a part of the movement, albeit with a fair dose of scepticism. Here was a political poet known for his fondness for former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and eulogies dedicated to current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was asserting that Bedi, not he, was the BJP’s mole in India against Corruption (IaC)! But my amusement was not substantive enough to merit a full-fledged artic

His strategy of playing the underdog and targeting high-profile rivals was sticking with the people until he turned out to be a serial liar T his man has gone mad. While “mad” is not a standard term in the lexicon of political commentators, I couldn’t find a more apt description for Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal based on his behaviour over the past month or two. First, the rabble-rouser who cleverly avoided even mild criticism of Narendra Modi at the formative stage of the Aam Aadmi Party, fearing it would alienate the masses, called the Prime Minister a “coward” and “psychopath”. Thereafter, the self-styled crusader against corruption trained his guns at Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, following a CBI raid on the office of Rajendra Kumar, the Chief Minister’s principal secretary facing a hell lot of charges of corruption . Recall that a previous attack on Jaitley, where the AAP had accused him of horse trading , did not stick. Then, Kejriwal does not have the humility to

They did everything to subvert internal democracy in the Aam Aadmi Party until the tables turned against them. In all likelihood, the party chief tolerated them for his own intellectual shortcoming and the fear that the duo would be dangerous as dissenters. Their story of subterfuge is long. While one of them was initially admired within the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for disarming other panellists on television talk shows with a modulated intonation of voice, the other was hailed for his public interest litigations (PILs) against perceived corrupt people. But neither Yogendra Yadav nor Prashant Bhushan is popular in the party, not at least in the national council — the third line of command of which this writer was a part till 21 November 2013, when I resigned due to a manifesto of freebies and doles. In the ultimate analysis, such a manifesto that has persisted till 2015 would not have been possible if there was internal democracy in the AAP right from the time of its ince

Surajit Dasgupta , a former journalist, was Aam Aadmi Party’s founding member and was also part of its National Council. However, he quit AAP much before the Delhi Assembly polls that were held in December 2013 due to certain differences over the working of the party. In an interview with  Manisha Singh  of  Zee Media Corp , he spoke about the contradictions within the AAP, the reasons why he resigned from the party and also what he thinks of Arvind Kejriwal. Here are excerpts from the interview. The full interview: Why did you join Aam Aadmi Party in the first place? And what were some of the pertinent issues over which you disagreed with the party and due to which you subsequently left AAP?   As an individual since 2010 and as a part of the organisation Youth for Democracy (Y4D) since early 2011, I had been fighting for the cause of vyawastha parivartan (systemic change). One of the patrons of Y4D was KN Govindacharya who had come out of his RSS shell and BJP past in 2004 to