This newspaper has revealed Details of the CAG report on the renovation of 6, Flag Staff Road, office and residence of then Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. From the lavish splurge on curtains and carpets to far more expensive substitutes for items and fixtures, from frequent upward revision of estimates and a pattern of escalation of costs to irregularities in tendering and other paperwork, it makes for a sobering read. It seems like such an inexplicable self-goal by a party that broke through the high walls of the system on the back of an anti-corruption movement. All the AAP’s attempts to defend itself — it has called the controversy a diversionary tactic by the BJP, pointed to the costs of the residence, aircraft and suits of PM Modi, and to the fact that the CM’s residence is not a personal asset, will be allotted to others in the future — only call attention to its own narrowing.

A party that claimed to change the way politics is done and to make a power-drunk system heed the everyday concerns of the Aam Aadmi, a party that proclaimed an ambition to re-imagine the government school and health center, has only itself to blame. if the conversation ahead of an important election veers to the cost of the TV console and the L-shaped sofa, the silk carpet and the faux leather cladding, in the CM’s home-office.

In its best version, the creation of AAP as a political party, its sudden emergence outside the System, from the heart of the Anna Hazare-led movement against an apparently scam-riddled UPA regime, had held promise — it would be a departure from the pomposity and pretension, the frill and frippery of politics-as-usual, if not an alternative to the established players and their corrupt ways.

Its work to re-furbish the government school and its attention to the local mohalla clinic seemed to be putting together a “Delhi model” of governance, which could bridge the distance between the political party and the life-world of the ordinary voter that had grown increasingly apart. Its drawing upon a religious (Hindu) idiom seemed to be an interesting and innovative response to a changing political landscape in times of BJP dominance — sidestepping the sterility of the Congress-Left vocabulary, in order to prevent nationalism-patriotism and religion-culture from being hijacked by the BJP, or becoming a BJP monopoly.

As time went on, on all these counts, however, the AAP began to invite more and more questions, even as it also bore the brunt of the BJP’s unrelenting aggression and hostility towards it. It has seemed to run out of governance ideas and energy on the one hand, and on the other, to throw itself much more fully in fighting the BJP on terms set by the BJP.

Ahead of the upcoming election, the AAP is playing the religious gimmick and stoking the polarizing issue. There is Kejriwal announcing the Pujari Granthi Samman Rashi scheme, and Chief Minister Atishi alleging that it was the LG, not her government, that signed off on the demolition of temples and religious structures in Delhi. More disquietingly, the AAP government has entered into a full-blooded joust with the BJP on the issue of Rohingya and illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in Delhi, with the political race to the bottom even barging headlong into the very Delhi classroom that the AAP had earlier worked. to make more spacious and inclusive — two weeks ago, Delhi government directed schools to prevent enrollment of “illegal Bangladesh migrant” children, and inform police and other authorities “in case of any doubt” about a student’s citizenship.

An embattled AAP is evidently trying to take the fight to the BJP in Delhi, but in the process it may well be losing sight of the larger stirrings set off by the idea of ​​AAP, and not just in Delhi. Regardless of whether Kejriwal’s party wins or loses the impending election, 6 Flag Staff Road, the CM’s house that he renovated extravagantly, may well become the address of a political possibility that shrank itself.

Till next week,

Vandita