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If you've just got a learner's licence and still manage to crash your car, do you humbly go back to training harder or blame the city for placing lamp-posts in the wrong places?
Well, if you are Arvind Kejriwal, you will think nothing of blaming everybody but yourself for the wreckage. His is a case of a media love story gone bad and, far from realising his mistakes, he is in self-destruct mode. By claiming yesterday (14 March) that the whole of the media is paid and that he will send some of them to jail if he comes to power , he is teetering on the brink of becoming a failed politician and, worse, leader. The Aam Aadmi Party's journalists spent more time yesterday trying to justify his stand than making course corrections.
I do not for a moment believe that Kejriwal is a tyrant and will actually send any journo to jail - even though some of them may well deserve it - if he comes to power. But it seems he can completely lose it when he doesn't get his way on something. Right now, the media has seen too much publicity-seeking behaviour to keep falling for it. Kejriwal is up against the law of diminishing returns.
The boss of the Aam Aadmi Party seems to think that the world should run according to his rules. It won't. Even if he wants to change the game of politics he still has to follow some of the existing rules. The lamp-post will not be removed to some distant corner just because Kejriwal's driving skills are not good enough. The purpose of having lamp-posts and street lights is to illuminate the road (which is also the media's role), not to thwart the ambitions of the driver.
If Kejriwal has any sense, he should apologise to the media and get back to his political driving classes. Here are some lessons he needs to learn if he is to make a good politician – and a clean one.
First, don't let paranoia drive you. The world may not agree with you, but that does not make all of them crooks or enemies out to get you. Kejriwal went to Gujarat and then expressed surprise that he wasn't killed in an encounter. He got criticised in the media and now believes everybody is out to show him in bad light. He should remember that the media has no permanent heroes. It discovered Anna in 2011 and dumped him in 2012. It discovered Modi in early 2013 and gave full coverage to his speeches. Now it gives only edited versions. The media raised Kejriwal sky-high after December 2013, and is now tiring of his antics. Some are wondering if they have been sold a dud. The best way to win back the media's favour is to focus on doing something positive. The media will come back at some point of time. For 12 years, Modi was a pariah. He remains that for some. But there is also grudging acceptance that he may have done something right.
Second, don't confuse tactics with strategy. Kejriwal has been a master tactician so far – but there is no strategy behind what he does. All his gains have been tactical, not strategic. He used the social media in 2011 to drum up support for the Anna fasts against corruption. After he broke up with Anna, he managed to keep himself in the news by holding press conferences every week claiming he will expose someone big. It worked for a while. He then created a political party that hit a gold mine in Delhi by tapping enthusiastic volunteers with a clear message. His tactics, of constantly seeking media coverage, have worked so far and paid him rich dividends. But attracting the media does not amount to a strategy. To attract the voter, the media is useful, but not central. A strategy calls for identifying your potential voter base, creating programmes to fulfil them, and using opportunities in power to execute the strategy. This is exactly what he has not done. Tactics got him the limelight and the CM's gaddi; only strategy will get him further.
Third, negativity will not work forever. To know the truth of this, he needs to look no further than the BJP's tactics while in opposition. For nine years, the BJP's leaders were presented with scam after scam, opportunity after opportunity. The BJP's men and women of straw sat in TV studios and made a nuisance of themselves in Parliament. They got nowhere. Their job was to go to the people and convince them that they could do a better job than the Congress. But the BJP's leaders used the scams to promote themselves – exactly what Kejriwal is doing now – and all their negative campaigning did not win them any additional constituency. It was only the arrival of Narendra Modi with his Gujarat model – however flawed you may think the model is – that finally injected positivity into the BJP's campaigning. But Kejriwal is still out there, blaming the lamp-post, blaming the past. Modi is out there wooing the people with promises about the future.
Fourth, don't mistake luck for performance. Don't assume your good looks and brilliance alone got you here. The world is full of lucky people who merely happened to be in the right place at the right time and benefited from it. But they then went on to assume that success is their birth-right – and made mistakes and failed. The corporate world is full of former successes who have now lost it all (Enron, WorldCom), or are about to (Nokia, Blackberry, etc). Kejriwal is lucky that the mood of the Delhi electorate matched his tactics in 2013. He gambled all and won. He stood against Sheila Dikshit and defeated her. But to keep winning, he has to keep working on his strengths and eliminating his weaknesses, and do some hard work. But he simply ran away from it after 49 days. You may be unlucky despite hard work; but when you are lucky beyond your wildest dreams, it is time to work harder, not assume that you can win without effort. (Google's primary claim to success is search; it is using this lucky success to build other successes. Microsoft's success came from owning the desktop; but it has not found too much success anywhere else despite making efforts.) The moral: don't confuse luck with genuine success.
Fifth, focus on the customer, not the competition. In Delhi, Kejriwal focused on key concerns of the voter and got a reasonable mandate. But that lucky success appears to have gone to his head and given him visions of instant political growth all over the country. He is hoping to make it big by throwing mud at his rivals rather than running the race himself. This may keep him in the media's sights for a while, but is ultimately a losing strategy. When you are in a race, you focus on the winning post, not who is next to you and how to trip him. Having got the Delhi voter, he abandoned her. Now he presumes Delhi is already in the bag. He wants every voter to fall for his charm when he is trying to tar his opponents. This is the surest way to defeat. It is better to pretty up your own face than tarring the opponent – however tempting that is.
Sixth, don't keep changing the goalposts. Kejriwal's claim to fame is the anti-corruption movement. Now, of course, nothing is left of this USP. Some time ago, he said communalism is worse than corruption, when no one – not even the BJP – is talking communalism today. The battle against corruption is far from won, but Kejriwal wants new windmills to tilt against. He started out criticising the UPA's big scams, but now these scams don't seem to matter at all to him. This is the main reason for his recent loss of credibility. Modi has not lost track of his goals – Congress-mukt Bharat and development – but Kejriwal is changing his colours and enemies by the hour.
Seventh, consolidate before you go forward. The right strategy for Kejriwal is the one adopted by Kanshi Ram to build the BSP. Kanshi Ram's initial plan was not to win seats, but increase his vote share till it reached critical mass. With every succeeding election, he came closer and closer to power. In Kejriwal's case, even before he has built a wide voter base, he is rushing all over. Delhi has not even been permanently converted to his cause, but he wants to fight 400 Lok Sabha seats – without a strategy, without an organisation, without a vision - beyond staying in the news.
Eighth, morality is no substitute for clarity of vision and hard work. The fight against corruption is not only good versus bad, white versus black, but lighter grey versus dark grey. At one level, corruption is not a morality play at all: it is about changing the rules of the game steadily so that corruption becomes less of a paying proposition over time. Corruption is rampant because we have created an ecosystem where both rich and poor feel they have no option but to be corrupt. Also, the corruption ecosystem has created a parallel economy which also supports livelihoods. From traffic cops to train ticket checkers to RTO inspectors to people who man octroi check nakas, the chain of corruption feeds millions of people and households. Corruption is what is greasing the wheels of the India story even today.
You cannot reduce corruption by pretending that the livelihoods of millions of people do not matter. The battle against corruption will thus be slow and hard – changing rules, reducing arbitrary power, improving transparency, etc. Over time, people will shift from the illegitimate economy to the real one. Morality is important at the personal level, but it is not a good enough weapon against systemic corruption – which is not about individuals but all of us. Maybe that is why Kejriwal has abandoned anti-corruption as his goal and begun targeting individuals instead. It is easier to make villains of individuals than the system. He will fail.
Last, nobody can be fooled forever. Kejriwal had the media eating out of his hands for all of December, but the mood started changing once he went on his infamous dharna and when his law minister went chasing African women on some moral cause. After that, the media started seeing the warts on his face – even behind the muffler. He still continued to get a good press, given his willingness to give the media regular access, but he took this for granted. At the best of times, the media is a fickle animal. But it is not completely unable to see the difference between make-believe and reality.
Kejriwal has to grow up. He has a good message to give, but he also has hard work to do to convince the people that he means business. Right now, his media tactics are up against the law of diminishing returns.
The writer is editor-in-chief, digital and publishing, Network18 Group
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