RESEARCH

They did everything to subvert internal democracy in the Aam Aadmi Party until the tables turned against them. In all likelihood, the party chief tolerated them for his own intellectual shortcoming and the fear that the duo would be dangerous as dissenters. Their story of subterfuge is long. While one of them was initially admired within the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for disarming other panellists on television talk shows with a modulated intonation of voice, the other was hailed for his public interest litigations (PILs) against perceived corrupt people. But neither Yogendra Yadav nor Prashant Bhushan is popular in the party, not at least in the national council — the third line of command of which this writer was a part till 21 November 2013, when I resigned due to a manifesto of freebies and doles. In the ultimate analysis, such a manifesto that has persisted till 2015 would not have been possible if there was internal democracy in the AAP right from the time of its ince

Dig deep into Anna Hazare’s past and you will see how an ordinary man, basking in the glory of cleverly designed ‘people’s movements’ from Maharashtra to Delhi, started believing he was a saint like the protagonist of the 1965 Hindi film  Guide I n the 1965 classic Guide , Raju, the main character played by ‘evergreen’ Dev Anand, is a boy-next-door with a fair share of rights and wrongs in life. He gets into a relationship with an adulterous Rosie (played by Waheeda Rehman), commits forgery, gets caught and is jailed. The fraud was committed for the sake of retaining Rosie’s love and not letting her return to her husband. That is to say, Raju had a heart after all. On release, Raju wanders about in search of some meaning of life. He is unsure, miserable, in tatters, starving and lonely until he runs into a wandering group of hermits with whom he spends a night at a derelict temple in a village. With some turn of events, the villagers get an impression he is a holy