A few years back, (to be exact – from the time Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party lost its bearings and descended into the depths of moral turpitude; drunk with power and corrupt illegitimacy) I lost my taste for political utopias; those apocalypses that promise to bring heaven down to earth. I now know that they usually lead to injustices as serious as those they hope to put to right. Since then, I have begun to believe that common sense is the most valuable of political virtues.

“We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.” Thus wrote the Peruvian Nobel Prize Winner Mario Vargas Llosa in an essay in 1979.  I have found that in politics mediocre solutions tend to be the best solutions. One could define it as a truism. We cannot abolish governments but we can, on the other hand, restrain them, so that they cause as little damage as possible. We cannot put an end to wars, religion, and covetousness towards property through an apocalyptic explosion. But we can democratize and neutralize those institutions that create them, making them more flexible and relative so that they have less control over human freedom and do not stand in the way of progress towards equality. The only solution in politics, as I see it, is to be a realist.

It was Dr. Martin Luther King who said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” But, the curve of the arc is so imperceptible that most people just do not see it. Rebecca Solnit writes in her article “The Arc of Justice and the Long Run”: “I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held. And I know that we don’t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing.”

The largest mountain and the largest volcano in the solar system, both are the same - Olympus Mons on the planet Mars. The mountain rises up to a height of a staggering 26 kilometers making it three times the height of Mount Everest. But if one were to attempt climbing it one would hardly get the feeling that one was on a mountain. Its slope is so gentle that it almost looks flat. The popular perception of volcanoes is that of a steep mountain hiding within its bosom vast amounts of destructive energy that, once unleashed, devours whole cities. The absence of tectonic plate movement on Mars allows the Martian crust to remain fixed in place over a magma hotspot allowing repeated, large lava flows. At its base, Olympus Mons is 550 Kms. The curvature of this volcano is just as imperceptible as the moral arc of Dr. King. The energy contained within Dr. King’s moral universe can also be infinite, but as Rebecca Solnit writes, “sometimes hope lies in not looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.”

When, on 28^th August 2011, Anna Hazare broke his fast after a thirteen-day Satyagraha at the Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi, perhaps there was not one person who would have foreseen the event that happened at the same venue on the 28^th of December 2013. The Aam Aadmi Party won exactly 28 seats in a 70-member legislature, and Arvind Kejriwal with seven of his colleagues were sworn in as ministers exactly 28 months after Anna Hazare suspended his agitation at the Ramlila Maidan.

The euphoria generated by the success of this fledgling political outfit had given rise to new expectations and new confidence among the suffering masses of this country who had been toiling under the crushing burdens of inflation, unemployment, corruption, insecurity, hunger, lack of education and health services, and a host of other disorders that an indifferent political and administrative dispensation had been inflicting upon them.

In a land that has been brought up on a steady diet of mythological lore of divine avatars descending from their heavenly abodes to rid this earth of evil demons, it becomes very easy for people to believe that Arvind Kejriwal was some kind of a 21^st-century avatar of Lord Krishna who had descended upon Hastinapur to rid it of its Kauravas and their evil empire. There was a tremendous amount of goodwill for the new CM and his team and the media was gushing forth like a torrent predicting the Aam Aadmi wave in the coming Lok Sabha elections.

The journalists whose psephological exertions went so wrong to have learned nothing from that experience. In areas where angels fear to tread, they were rushing in with new calculations and making bold declarations like the BJP would have more to fear from AAP than from the Congress. It is as if they could see the curvature of the arc with absolute clarity. But, as Solnit writes, it would be much better if we looked backward to study the arc that originated with Anna Hazare’s first fast at Jantar Mantar.

The UPA’s own Olympus Mons erupted with repeated magma flows in the shape of Adarsh, 2G, CWG, Antrix-Devas, Tatra Trucks, Coalgate, and a number of other explosions, and in the absence of any tectonic plate movement within the Congress party, the crust at the top just became thicker and thicker. However, it also became possible for people to see the curvature of the arc of moral injustice, and when Anna Hazare decided to sit on a fast demanding the institution of a Jan Lokpal; he touched a raw nerve in almost every citizen of the land.

The overwhelming response from the people was quite infectious and the contours of a moral revolution were just getting outlined. The movement that began on 5^th April 2011 at Jantar Mantar soon grew into a mass civic protest across urban India. By keeping politicians of all hues at bay, it derived a moral legitimacy that similar protest movements had failed to garner in the past.

But it would have been obvious to even a child that a government, neck-deep in corruption, would never agree to the proposals put forward by civil society; that it would resort to deception, lies, subterfuge, disinformation, and physical coercion to crush the movement; exactly how the Manmohan Singh government responded to Anna Hazare’s challenge. It had no compunction in orchestrating a debate in the Lok Sabha and then adopting, what was euphemistically called a “sense of the house” resolution on three key issues raised by Anna Hazare.

The “sense of the house” resolution moved by Pranab Mukherjee on 27^th August 2011, read, “This House agrees ‘in principle’ on following issues — (i) Citizen's Charter, (ii) lower bureaucracy under Lokpal through an appropriate mechanism, and (iii) establishment of Lokayukta in the States; And further resolves to forward the proceedings of the House to the Standing Committee on Law and Justice while finalizing its report.” The Standing Committee, we know, is where all inconvenient demands are sent for ceremonial burial. Anna Hazare broke his fast the next day, and from then began his journey into obscurity and irrelevance.

Political battles cannot be fought non-politically. Whoever advised Anna against converting the protest movement into a new political association had obviously never been a student of history. By dissociating his movement from Arvind Kejriwal and denouncing the formation of the Aam Aadmi Party, Anna Hazare had failed to see the truth behind moral pretensions.

Political realism, as defined by Robert Musil, the Austrian writer, in his novel, “The Man Without Qualities” is a “sensibility driven by needs rather than by ideas.” Robert D. Kaplan, in his essay “Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism” writes, “Realism is thus about deftly playing the hand that has been dealt you. It is not exciting or inspiring. Journalistic careers are rarely built on embracing realism, though policy-making careers often are.”

To his credit, Arvind Kejriwal and his associates never hesitated from playing the hand that had been dealt to them. All of us, including this author, cheered from the sidelines. Kejriwal had defeated Sheila Dikshit who had ruled Delhi for 15 years by a huge margin.

Though we would have liked to see AAP join hands with the BJP that had 32 seats (together making an 80% majority of the House) but were not much dismayed that Kejriwal decided to take outside support from the Congress to form the government. Less than 2 months later, as is the practice with the Congress, it withdrew support for the Lokpal resolution, bringing down the Kejriwal government. In the subsequent elections after President’s rule in Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party won 67 seats on its own leaving the BJP with 3 and Congress with Zero seats.

It is from here that Kejriwal’s moral arc broke from King’s trajectory, moving away from justice, and towards Vargas’ utopias that “end in holocausts.” Kejriwal’s arrogance and the lack of ethical morality soon sprouted the utterly unanticipated dragon seeds that we didn’t know the soil held.

Today, we have come a long way from that heady day in December 2013. Kejriwal, his underling Sisodia, and the entire power structure of the Aam Aadmi Party stand exposed as so many Sisupalas bent upon disgracing the honour of Mother India.

There are allegations that Kejriwal is an agent of foreign Break-India elements – his dalliance with Khalistanis is no longer a secret. The dubious role of the Ford Foundation and the support provided by the various arms of George Soros’ global financial empire to keep Kejriwal on the spearhead should confirm these allegations.

From the day he occupied the chair in Delhi, Kejriwal has come tumbling down from his moral high ground, fooling the people with false promises of high-class schools and hospitals, while greasing their palms with unsustainable freebies. He has spent massive amounts on Media publicity ensuring that this pillar of our democracy asks him no inconvenient questions. The liquor scandal that has blown up in his face does not appear to faze him one bit.

Almost nine years in power has made him so thick-skinned that nothing seems to penetrate that rhinoceros hide. Every time he opens his mouth nothing but lies come out. He won Punjab on the back of a fake farmers’ agitation, stoking imaginary fears among the farming community of Punjab, and at the same time fanning a separatist Khalistani agenda, that can only benefit India’s arch-enemy Pakistan. He has not shied away from using liquor and drugs to grease the political rise of his party in Punjab – a strategy that has paid him rich dividends in that state.

With ambitions of going national he will use the same strategy in Himachal and Gujarat, when these two states go to the polls next. The rapidity with which he is going down the moral escalator has no parallel, except perhaps in Lalu Prasad Yadav’s 15 years of Jungle Raj in Bihar.

Looking back at the moral arc, as suggested by Rebecca Solnit, from the time Anna Hazare began his first fast at Jantar Mantar, we can clearly see when it began to deflect from justice towards its opposite, injustice. The curvature rapidly increased after the 2020 assembly elections in which AAP registered another thumping victory in Delhi. Kejriwal and Sisodia have become arrogant beyond the limit, as power has gone to their heads. The widening gap between justice and injustice is increasing rapidly with no hope of the arc ever bending towards the former so long as this dispensation continues to rule the city-state.

Hopefully, the emerging liquor license story in which Manish Sisodia is directly implicated will explode like another Olympus Mons, as it did in the face of the UPA, and this band of thieves and robbers, masquerading as a political party will be booted out unceremoniously by the Lt. Governor, and then by the people in the subsequent assembly elections. Only then will Dr. King’s moral arc begin to converge towards justice for Delhi and Punjab.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy” - Martin Luther King