Arvind Kejriwal and the senior leadership of his Aam Aadmi Party have maintained a conspicuous silence on the Supreme Court’s conviction of advocate Prashant Bhushan, a co-founder of the party who stands expelled, for criminal contempt.
Even the Congress, which lost the 2014 Lok Sabha elections largely because of the graft allegations levelled by Bhushan, Kejriwal and their India Against Corruption movement, has expressed concern over the judgment.
Second-rung AAP leaders have tweeted in Bhushan’s favour and shared his statement in court refusing to apologise. However, no AAP leader has signed any of the multiple statements issued in Bhushan’s support. Several Opposition leaders, including the Congress’s Digvijaya Singh and Shashi Tharoor, have lent their names to the statements.
An AAP source told The Telegraph: “Prashant never came to our support when false cases were foisted on our leaders. Within the party, they (Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, another expelled leader) are seen as ungrateful, considering the stature that common workers had elevated them to. They (Bhushan and Yadav) damaged our prospects solely to the benefit of the BJP in the 2017 Delhi municipal polls. However, they took a positive stand towards us in the Assembly polls earlier this year. So opinion within the party on whether or not we should stick our neck out for them is divided.”
He added: “Some finality is awaited in his case, and the party’s official stand on his case will take shape, if at all, after the sentencing.”
Kejriwal’s silence stands out in contrast to his activist avatar, like the time he had called Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “psychopath” after the CBI raided his office in 2015.
The Delhi chief minister began to pipe down after AAP’s poor debut in the 2017 municipal polls. However, even as late as last year, Kejriwal had exclaimed after the Supreme Court verdict did not go completely in favour of his government in his tussle with the Centre: “What democracy is this?”
Another AAP functionary told this paper on Wednesday: “The party’s general sentiment on this (Bhushan’s case) has been expressed by leaders like Ajoy Kumar, Ankit Lal, Preeti Menon and Jasmine Shah. The question is what stake do we have in this case? Does it benefit or harm us in any way? The case itself looks like a work in progress. Arvind does not need to constantly comment on everything.”
An article being shared within AAP circles is journalist and former party leader Ashish Khetan’s recent profile of Bhushan in The Print web portal.
The unease within AAP over taking a stand for a rebel, sources said, has been explained by Khetan who wrote: “The Bhushans’ (Prashant and his father Shanti Bhushan) tacit support to the misuse of agencies by the Centre against AAP smacks of double standard…. When the AAP government’s powers were whittled away illegally by an authoritarian central government, P. Chidambaram, casting away his trenchant political opposition to AAP, represented the Delhi government before the Supreme Court in 2017 and argued against the Centre’s unconstitutional assault on the elected government in Delhi.”
Kejriwal’s silence is more telling at a time he has been accused by activists of playing second fiddle to the BJP by appearing to remain a bystander during the February riots in Delhi, then doing precious little for rehabilitation, and echoing the BJP’s propaganda that the protests against the new citizenship regime at Shaheen Bagh had led to the flare-up.