The Delhi Files: Ambition, subterfuge and ignominy

The Aam Aadmi Party—the party supposedly born from activism against corruption—is under assiduous scrutiny yet again, this time by the country’s premier investigation agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which raided Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia’s house, the personage of India Against Corruption protests, and the closest aid of Arvind Kejriwal, in connection with the Delhi Excise Policy scam. The irony couldn’t be any more lost!

In a video posted on Twitter shortly after the CBI began searching at Manish Sisodia’s home, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was in no two minds to put his confidante on a pedestal and referred to him as “India’s best education minister” while waving a front-page New York Times report lauding the Delhi government’s efforts to improve public school education. “Soon after Manish Sisodia was declared the best education minister in the world, the CBI raided his house in a false case adhering to the orders of the witch hunt against us by the Central government,” Arvind Kejriwal, de facto supreme leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), claimed in a video address.

To Kejriwal—the mastermind of the shoot and scoot politics—it seemed the best defence was a strong offence. As expected, defiant and self-proclaimed “anarchist” Kejriwal brashed the serious allegations against Sisodia by trumpeting a propaganda piece published in the New York Times, a penchant for lies and fearmongering against India.

Even though Sisodia is one of the people named in the FIR filed by the CBI, the AAP ran several social media campaigns in which they tweeted at the same time to show the “global recognition” that Sisodia’s education model got from a US-based publication. However, when the New York Times article captures a growing India, it is the hyenas singing lullabies to the fawn. The New York Times‘ narrow prejudice prism with Indians is much older. Not to eschew the infamous offensive cartoon by Heng Kim Song, mocking India’s space programme, which was published by The New York Times in 2014. The condescending cartoon depicted a farmer with a cow knocking at the door of a room marked Elite Space Club where two men sit reading a newspaper on India’s achievements, but was soon taken down for its murky stand.

Two years later, ISRO set a new record by launching 104 satellites into space on a single rocket. This rot lies much deeper.

In March 2019, an incendiary and infuriating piece in The New York Times titled “After India Loses Dogfight to Pakistan, Questions Arise About Its ‘Vintage’ Military” claims India’s defeat on its Mig-21 Bison being hit, but is conveniently silent on the Western neighbour’s F-16 being shot down. The American newspaper has given space to voices inimical to India on several occasions, spinning stories and obfuscating facts to paint India in a grim and bad light.

Following the repeal of Article 370 from the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, the publication invited and provided a platform for then Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan, who launched a scathing attack on India’s sovereign rights. The New York Times has frequently defined India as “rapes and murders,” a place where “death is the only truth,” and these pen-pushers repeat a dated narrative polarised by identity politics, misplaced virtue-signalling, and covert privileges. In a similar incident, another published cartoon, by Heng Kim-again-depicting India as an elephant, which is on a railway track, blocking a train named ‘Paris Climate Summit’ was published, but soon, India was ranked as the only G20 nation well on track to achieve the goals mentioned under the Paris Agreement and amongst the top 10 countries in the climate change performance index.

If the New York Times‘ constant hammering of an inferiority complex on Indians for everything invariably isn’t enough to reflect their innate scorn for India, their requirement of a business correspondent, based in India, should do the rest, and it said: “India’s future now stands at a crossroads. Mr. Modi is advocating a self-sufficient, muscular nationalism centred on the country’s Hindu majority. That vision puts him at odds with the interfaith, multicultural goals of modern India’s founders. The government’s growing efforts to police online speech and media discourse have raised difficult questions about balancing issues of security and privacy with free speech. Technology is both a help and a hindrance.”

Moreover, in China’s Daily disclosure submitted to the US justice department for the period between November 2016 and April 2020, it was revealed that the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, spent millions of dollars on influential and leading newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post, indicating the reason for its palpable bias. While India’s future may not be at a crossroads, the future of journalism surely is. Worse still, the New York Times isn’t the United States’ top newspaper, as claimed by our muffler-clad astute politician, but the position is held by USA Today. Adding to it, the questionable article is posted on the Khaleej Times, which has the same text and pictures as the NYT article.

Controverting the popular perception, created using sumptuous advertisements, the “Delhi educational” model is absolute fiction. Education, painted as Kejriwal’s marquee accomplishment, seems demonstrably worse off post-Kejriwal than before him. While the Kejriwal government is believed to have built many classrooms, also alleged to have been built at an extortionate cost, its performance is quite chequered and such cosmetic changes are meaningless. In fact, Delhi’s pass percentage in 10th grade CBSE was 98.40 per cent in 2013 but plummeted to 78.62 per cent in 2018.

In Delhi’s government schools, the pass percentage had never dropped below 89 per cent since 2010, but not only did the AAP government fail to arrest the decline, the pass percentage plummeted to a record 69.32 per cent low for the first time in 2018! In a Right to Information (RTI) plea, filed by a city resident, it was revealed that not a single college had been opened since 2015, against the AAP’s promise of building at least 20 colleges in the 2015 Delhi elections. Worse, even teachers aren’t spared.

Around 52 per cent of trained graduate teaching positions in Delhi government schools are lying vacant. Teachers at 12 colleges run by the Delhi government haven’t been paid their salaries for months now. Even the Delhi High Court, through Justice Prasad, slammed the Delhi government on this. Of the 1,027 Delhi government schools, 824 are functioning without a principal.

While the AAP dispensation has tried its best to oversell the propaganda piece, the rest will be propagated by Kejriwal’s PR artillery to sweep the uncomfortable truth about the ‘Delhi model’ under the carpet.

An RTI request revealed that, over the last decade, Delhi’s advertising expenses increased by an exorbitant 4,372 percent, amounting to a massive Rs 488.97 crore in 2021-22. The same was flagged by the Comptroller and Auditor General in a report, and it mentioned: “On test check of records, the audit observed that expenditure of R 24.29 crore was incurred on advertisements and publicity campaigns that were not in conformity with the generally accepted principles of financial propriety or the guidelines on content regulation approved by the Supreme Court. Over 85 per cent of the expenditure of Rs 33.40 crore incurred in one specific publicity campaign pertained to advertisements released outside Delhi, which was beyond the responsibility of the Delhi government”. The report also slammed the AAP government for violating the apex court’s guidelines on “political neutrality” and advertisements on women’s safety.

Surprisingly, the AAP administration is never concerned about lying in broad daylight. In a tweet, AAP’s MLA Atishi Marlena said, “It was wonderful to host officials from Kerala at one of our schools in Kalkaji. They were keen to understand and implement our education model in their state. This is Arvind Kejriwal’s idea of nation-building. Development through collaboration.”

However, denying the supposed visit by Kerala officials, Kerala Education and Labour Minister Sivankutty tweeted: “Kerala’s Dept of Education has not sent anyone to learn about the ‘Delhi Model’. At the same time, all assistance was provided to officials who had visited from Delhi to study the “Kerala Model” last month. We would like to know which ‘officials’ were welcomed by the AAP MLA.”

Kejriwal ideologically stands for zilch, but his fluid opportunism has often worked for him. During the day, he’ll mock and invalidate the genocide of the Kashmiri Pandits, and during the night, he’ll sermonise in support of the Kashmiri Pandits.

With such a background of chicanery and subterfuge, obscuring of facts, mismanagement of resources, and flagrant hypocrisy, Sisodia said, “Arvind Kejriwal’s becoming India’s next prime minister is not a matter of an individual’s ambition, but is the ambition of the whole country.”

Wishful thinking has no limits, but Manish Sisodia belies its hype.

The author is an independent journalist and columnist. Views expressed are personal.

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