It was on last Saturday that the citizens of Delhi, as indeed followers of the AAP politics across the country, sat and took notice of 36-year-old Kapil Mishra, an AAP leader and a member of the Kejriwal Cabinet.
Mishra, out of the blue, tweeted that he had discussed some very important thing to do with corruption with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. He would make them public the next day. Only the previous day, he had written, on his official letter head, to A.K. Meena,the head of the Delhi Anti-Corruption Bureau, asking why former chief minister Sheila Dixit had not been interrogated in the water tanker scam. Sometime the same day, he told the twitterati that he was the only minister with no corruption charges, and no CBI inquiry.
But by Tuesday, Mishra had snatched the leadership of the battle against corruption from Arvind Kejriwal, a man who burst into public life on the plank of anti-corruption crusade and stunned the country with the superb electoral performance of his nascent party in February 2015. Mishra had turned the tables on Kejriwal, who he considered his “guru” till then, and effectively charged him with indulging in corruption and shielding the corrupt.
Mishra represented the Karawal constituency, and had shot into lime light when he took his oath of office and secrecy in Sanskrit. With Amnesty and Greenpeace forming part of his CV, Mishra, with a Masters from the Delhi School of Social Work held half a dozen portfolios in the Kejriwal cabinet, the main being Water Resources and Tourism and Culture.
It began on Sunday with Mishra demanding the removal of his cabinet colleague and Health and PWD Minister Satyendra Jain, and accused Jain of taking bribes and shielding people involved in the 2012 water tanker scheme, and indulging in a land deal that involved his relatives.
A source in AAP says there was no indication of any rift between the chief minister and the waters minister till then. “Even now I don't know what has triggered this,” he said.
Kejriwal did not do what seasoned politicians would—call and talk to Mishra about it, and if need be, have the party issue a show cause notice etc. On Monday, he dropped him from the cabinet . Mishra then said he personally saw Jain give Kejriwal Rs 2 crores in cash. Kejriwal did not respond, but suspended him from the party.
Mishra said Kejriwal had been helped by Jain, to settle a Rs 50 crore land deal—a farm house in Delhi's plush and sylvan outskirts of Chattarpur—in his brother-in-law Surender Bansal's name. The timing of that revelation went wrong. Bansal had just been cremated !
Though the chief minister did not respond, Mishra added to his charges. Jain, who held the portfolio of PWD, had fudged bills to benefit Bansal by over Rs 10 crores, and Kejriwal and others had made money during the Punjab elections as well as the MCD polls when tickets were sold, Mishra maintained. AAP leaders had made foreign travels—some of them a dozen times—at the cost of the state as well as using “illegal money”. He demanded that the party come out with complete details of these trips.
Kejriwal said “truth will triumph”, and added he would reveal the whole truth in a specially convened session of the state Vidhan Sabha. But theatrically enough, the special session went on trying to expose the faulty EVMs. Mishra, meanwhile, brandished an envelope of three complaints he gave to the CBI— one pertained to the cash “bribe” which, he says, he saw Jain give Kejriwal, the second was a charge against Jain for fixing a land deal for his relative and the third regarding the foreign travels.
Taking a leaf out of Kejriwal's book, Mishra said he would launch a hunger strike if the details of the foreign tours were not made public by Wednesday.
The AAP leadership, however, has so far no more than rubbished the charges against Kejriwal and smelt a BJP hand in this fresh crisis in the party, which only last week placated an angry Kumar Vishwas. Even as Kejriwal has reserved his comments and reactions to this, Mishra has found traction from none other than Kejriwal's own guru, Anna Hazare. In a television interview, Anna declared Kejriwal, who was a warrior against corruption, a changed man now. Jain, on his part, has threatened to file a defamation case against Mishra.
The politicians of AAP, which was to disrupt the status quo of political parties, are now doing the usual thing. Mishra has dared Kejriwal to resign his seat and take him on in a contest in any constituency of his choice. That may sound like music to the BJP, whose Delhi leaders have been protesting outside the chief minister's house, demanding his resignation.
Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar summed it up saying, “AAP which boasted of zero tolerance against corruption, is now embroiled in corruption related controversies”. But for Kejriwal, it appears to be the biggest crisis in the barely five years of the party's existence.
