Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | In AAP-BJP Duel, Chadha Is No Knight In Shining Armour

Vice-President C.P. Radhakrishnan, Rajya Sabha Chairman, has given the legal stamp to the Raghav Chadha-led split in the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Upper House when he accepted the merger of the seven-member group into the BJP. It does not mean that the legal questions that arise in this connection are over. Of the seven, six MPs are from Punjab, and their terms end in 2028. It is the AAP’s overwhelming majority in the Punjab Assembly that has put these six members in the Rajya Sabha. The members of the Upper House are elected by the members of the Assembly. It is the 92 AAP members of the Punjab Assembly who had elected the six AAP Rajya Sabha members. The seventh, Swati Maliwal, got elected from the Delhi Legislative Assembly.

The courts may have to consider the issue if it comes before them whether the Rajya Sabha members who are elected by fellow party members of the Assembly can break free from the party as easily as members of the Lok Sabha where the voters are not members of a party. The argument will be made that members of the State Assembly vote in the election for Rajya Sabha members as members of the Assembly and not as members of the party.

Except for Ms Maliwal, whose term ends in 2030, the terms of other six will end in 2028, which also marks the end of the term of the Punjab Assembly. Even if the six had remained with the AAP, they may not have been re-elected because it is unlikely that the AAP will retain the 92 seats that it has in the outgoing Assembly. The BJP, of course, cannot hope to ever manage the kind of victory that the AAP had pulled off in Punjab. It might seem that the BJP has started to dream that if AAP could do it in Punjab, perhaps it is not beyond the BJP’s scope as well. But the BJP is a marked party, of the urban Hindus in the state. It cannot ever win over the Sikh-Jat farmers in the state, much less the Dalits spread across the Deras.

The Congress has its base among the Sikh-Jat farmers as well. This constituency is not the sole monopoly of the Akali Dal. The BJP has not been able to break out of its self-circumscribed Hindu base.

The window of opportunity for these six is, therefore, two years. Two years is of course a long time in politics. The question, which is necessarily speculative, is whether the BJP will accept them as its own because the list of BJP faithful is long enough. Yes, the BJP does accommodate “outsiders” depending on their clout on other grounds, which includes their financial and social status. In the long term, the seven have risked their political careers, and they seem to believe the risk is worth it. The Chadha-led defection in the Rajya Sabha is not just an accident. There is a bigger plan behind the small move. Mr Chadha might want to emerge as the face of the Punjab BJP, but it is a reasonably unrealistic proposition right now.

Mr Chadha has indeed emerged as the leader of the six. Ms Maliwal had already made up her mind about the BJP after her bitter fallout with AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal. Mr Chadha, by leading the six Rajya Sabha members, has shown that he can be useful to the BJP in hollowing out the AAP further.

Through intimidations and inducements, the BJP may be dreaming of getting a large number of the 92 AAP legislators in Punjab, and Chadha could be the man who would facilitate the large-scale defection. Mr Kejriwal and his AAP lieutenants are going to throw something like a “cordon sanitaire” around the AAP legislators. Mr Kejriwal, for all his faults as an obsessively focused leader, is far ahead in the political race, and Mr Chadha might find himself outpaced and outflanked.

The BJP would like to keep itself in the wings. The plan that brought Eknath Shinde out of the Shiv Sena led by Uddhav Thackeray and how in the end he was marginalised is the kind of plan that the BJP would like to execute in Punjab. Unlike Mr Shinde, Mr Chadha is not a grassroots man, and he may find it difficult to go through the process which will split the AAP in Punjab. It is possible that the BJP would not even attempt to topple the Bhagwant Singh Mann government if it senses that the situation does not favour it much. The BJP will then have to content itself with the additional seven Rajya Sabha members. The AAP government in Punjab was the most unexpected turn. Arvind Kejriwal had displayed enough leadership skills to take advantage of the windfall, and the AAP government has lasted the term. Elections are due next February.

The BJP-led Centre’s onslaught on the AAP through the liquor scam cases against Mr Kejriwal and two top colleagues, former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and former Delhi Cabinet minister Satyendra Jain, who were jailed for inordinately long periods, did not break the party. It had, however, lost the Delhi Assembly elections to the BJP in February last year. Delhi and Punjab are the two places where the AAP has put down roots, as it were, more so in Delhi than in Punjab. Mr Kejriwal now faces the challenge of defending the AAP terrain in Punjab and in Delhi.

It doesn’t seem the defection of seven Rajya Sabha members will break the AAP, or even weaken it. Mr Kejriwal will fight back with a doggedness that can frustrate BJP leaders. The AAP and BJP will fight each other till the bitter end as in many ways they share the same ideological orientation of nationalism and cultural rootedness. Both parties don’t think of politics in terms of policies and programmes. For them it goes deeper: it’s a matter of personal identity. Politics, for them, is not mere civic engagement, where elections are won and lost. Mr Kejriwal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi fight the political duel with a sense of commitment, which verges on the moral. For them, politics is holy war. The fight between the two turns into sibling rivalry. The AAP enjoys the endorsement of the RSS. That makes the BJP’s fight against the AAP so much more difficult. Raghav Chadha is not the knight-in-shining armour in the battle. That honour goes to Mr Kejriwal.