The Big Story: Other foot

It was always going to happen. If Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal did not see this coming, then his political instincts must be weaker than most imagine. Kejriwal helped build a massive anti-corruption movement and turned it into a political party that achieved stunning results in a short span of time, much of that on a platform of being different from the rest of the political class. Unusually for a politician, Kejriwal would speak openly and publicly about allegations of collusion between the country’s top industrialists and its political parties. The sort of thing that everyone seems to be aware of, yet mostly goes unmentioned because that level of corruption is simply expected to carry on. The AAP promised to break that nexus and convince people that a non-corrupt government actually could exist in India.

So it was always inevitable that someone would eventually try to argue that AAP itself is corrupt, and thereby try and hoist Kejriwal by his own petard. It should also have been expected that the sternest of these charges would not come from Opposition politicians, who would nevertheless be expected to rail against a party that goes against the norm. The real danger always was that someone from within would be the one to offer something damning about AAP being corrupt.

Former Delhi Water Minister Kapil Mishra has taken up the challenge. On Tuesday, Mishra registered three complaints with the Central Bureau of Investigation, all of which claimed that the AAP government is corrupt. Over the weekend, Mishra had already publicly claimed that Kejriwal had accepted Rs 2 crore in bribes in what is known as the water tanker scam.

Kejriwal has mostly remained mum about these allegations, although his acolytes have fanned out across the media to insist that Mishra is simply working at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Aside from insisting that it is all untrue, Kejriwal has focused on his party’s attempt to point out the ease with which Electronic Voting Machines can be hacked.

But that silence is troubling. First, this is not a BJP politician coming out and simply levelling allegations against Kejriwal and AAP. This is a member of their own Cabinet, who was holding an important position and privy to many operation details. Second, it is not enough to insist that all this is being done at the behest of other political parties. Kejriwal himself happily took the route of making corruption allegations without much evidence while he was riding the anti-corruption wave. How can his party now insist that allegations leveled at them are any different?

Many have focused on how the EVM matter is a clear sign of how the AAP has gone awry. The party seems to prefer shaking people’s faith in the democratic system instead of acknowledging that it might have gone wrong and been defeated fairly. But the more important response is on corruption charges. If Kejriwal cannot find a way to acknowledge the charges and respond that he is open to criticism and investigation, he will simply be following the playbook of politicians that he himself decried when he was part of the anti-corruption movement. How the AAP deals with a core member levelling corruption allegations will tell us much more about whether the party has been fully absorbed by the political class than its stance on EVMs.

The Big Scroll

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Punditry

  1. “The monetisation of cow protection encourages the emergence of criminalised gau raksha gangs, but it is the spiritual and moral affirmation bringing them together that allows them to perpetrate brutalities,” writes Pamela Phillipose in the Indian Express.
  2. Valerian Rodrigues in the Hindu says Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has built an impressive coalition of community groups, but may not have done enough to win the day in Assembly elections next year.
  3. “No doubt Justice Karnan’s actions have been unparalleled and extremely contemptuous but the Supreme Court may have just set a wrong precedent,” writes Ashok Bagriya in the Hindustan Times.
  4. Niranjan Rajadhyaksha in Mint has many questions about the NITI Aayog action plan that promises to take India forward in the next three years, without any of the strategies that are actually required to do so.

Don’t miss

Vijaysree Venkatraman tells the story of a scientist from Madras who won the global race in the 1950s to crack the structure of collagen, achieving a scientific breakthrough.

In 1952, GNR got a laboratory of his own. Studying biomolecules would be the lab’s theme, the crystal physicist had decided, but he didn’t know where to begin. Right around then, a former colleague from England, the renowned crystallographer JD Bernal, who was on a visit to Madras, informed GNR that many research groups were grappling with the structure of collagen – the most abundant protein in animals – and no one had hit the mark yet.

Collagen, present in the connective tissue of animals, gives strength and form to all creatures, humans included. Structure-wise, collagen seemed knottier than the DNA. This, GNR decided, would be the problem he would work on.