Jhadoo to jacuzzis: Why Arvind Kejriwal stands routed

medium118063968A decade ago, when Arvind Kejriwal rose like a colossus, he was truly what he claimed to be: an aam aadmi. A mere commoner who fired the imagination of Delhi through his slogan against corruption, he went on to make history by winning 67 of 70 seats in Delhi’s assembly.The joke in 2015 was that the three Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislators did not even need a car to drive to the assembly. They would easily fit in one of Delhi’s famed autorickshaws, it was said. In the 2020 election, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) tally came down only marginally, dropping from 67 to 62.In the just concluded election, Kejriwal, the giant slayer who had taken down the Sheila Dikshit government, has been swept aside by his own broom (the party’s symbol). He has not just lost his own seat of New Delhi; he has also lost the Capital.Kejriwal, in fact, has lost political capital. The man who strode the political firmament with his slogan against corruption has been felled by charges of corruption contained in the chargesheets that reference the liquor scam.Kejriwal is the one who entered the fray with a host of stalwarts, including his deputy Manish Sisodia and Atishi, who he handed the crown to after getting bail in the liquor scam case. Sisodia lost but Atishi made it to the list of winners.The BJP, which has won emphatically and definitively, has fewer stalwarts to showcase. The voters clearly decided to go with “Modi ki guarantee”, and handed down an embarrassing defeat to Kejriwal, the convener of AAP, a party that once also scripted history to be the only young political startup that got the status of being a national-level party after its win in Punjab in 2022. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/JyOMsxBIEUo?si=_HDjBLng9v-nQuEBSo, was 2025 an anti-incumbency election? Did Kejriwal lose only because voter fatigue had set in and Delhi was looking for a change?As an invested resident of Delhi, I’m acutely aware of the reasons why AAP lost. If Kejriwal stands routed today, it is not just because of his arrogance, though arrogance is a dangerous political trait to have. It is hubris, plain and simple.The BJP turned the knife with its “Sheesh Mahal” jibes, a reference to the ostentatious and grandiose renovation that Kejriwal made in the chief minister’s home, where he resided with his family. It stood out as a stark reminder of how Kejriwal had chipped away at his carefully crafted ‘aam aadmi’ image.The AAP leader had travelled a long distance since his anti-corruption days. He travelled far away from his voters too. He lost because of pure misgovernance. He tried to cover up his own track record by pointing to the obstacles he faced from the lieutenant governor’s office and the Centre’s ordinance that curtailed his powers.Some of this is true, but there was still a lot that Kejriwal and his large band of MLAs could have done. They could have paid attention to the civic amenities that have for long bogged Delhi. Forget about Kejriwal’s promise of turning Delhi into another Paris, the capital city has potholed roads.It also has a critical shortage of water supply. Instead of paying attention to the importance of ‘bijli, sadak, paani’, he focused on freebies. To give the devil his due, he did improve Delhi’s government schools and its healthcare infrastructure through mohalla clinics.Delhi was looking for more. The focus on what Kejriwal and his MLAs perceived to be their core vote bank comprising the economically weaker sections came at the cost of Delhi’s middle class.For the past 10 years, for example, I and my entire colony in South Delhi have learnt to live without fresh water supply. This was due not only because Haryana was not releasing a share of water to Delhi, as Kejriwal often likes to say. It was because water was being diverted to the poorer areas.AAP did that to nurture its constituency but again, I know for a fact that our taps were running dry because our pipes were tampered with and the supply diverted to AAP’s ‘catchment’ areas. In fact, when AAP won the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) election, many — including me — hoped that their “double engine” would bring some respite. The hope of basics like water and roads remained in vain. Kejriwal was no longer the middle-class hero. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/nYFFzB4HLPo?si=5SbH5_vZm7N8UR2tIt is the BJP’s double engine that has emerged victorious. It has brought Kejriwal’s decade out in the sun to a halt and stunningly so. The party has ended its own 27-year-old vanvaas from Delhi’s corridors of power.It was not an election only about freebies, even though the BJP promised the same ‘revdis’ that AAP had doled out in the past decade. The BJP, for instance, upped AAP’s ₹2,100 offer of paying Delhi’s non-tax-paying women to ₹2,500, but it was the larger issue of misgovernance that did Kejriwal in.Did AAP and the Congress make a mistake by not allying for the Delhi election, in keeping with the spirit of the INDIA alliance that came together as an Opposition front to the BJP for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls? Well, if they had, Kejriwal’s Delhi defeat would have been less ignominious.Some in the BJP are already writing Kejriwal’s obituary, but the AAP leader is a street fighter. For the time being, he needs to keep his flock together in Punjab.In the long run, before he decides on how he will move forward politically, he needs to introspect on why he suffered such a humiliating defeat in the heart of India’s capital.The ‘aam aadmi’ needs to think about why he went from ‘jhadoo’ to ‘jacuzzi’. An honest self-appraisal — and only an honest one — will help him script his political future.