What Arvind Kejriwal’s interim bail means for Aam Aadmi Party’s poll prospects in Haryana?

Nearly, a fortnight before Haryana and Delhi go to polls, the chief minister of Delhi was granted interim bail till June 1st in the money laundering case linked to the now-scrapped Delhi liquor policy. The Aam Aadmi Party supremo who rose to fame in national politics with the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare in 2011, was lodged in the Tihar Jail after the Enforcement Directorate arrested him on 21st March in connection with the Delhi liquor policy case. Notably, the Supreme Court while granting interim bail to Kejriwal ruled, “Let us not draw any parallel. He was arrested in March and the arrest could have been before or after. Now, after 21 days, there won't be any difference. On June 2, Arvind Kejriwal will surrender”.

If we talk about Kejriwal’s Haryana connection, the Delhi CM was born in an Agrawal family in Siwani in the Bhiwani district of Haryana. Kejriwal also completed his early education at the campus school in Hisar. While Kejriwal rose to the pinnacle of Delhi’s politics in the last decade, his party AAP is still trying to make inroads in the politics of Haryana. In the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections Aam Aadmi Party contested three seats in coalition with Dushyant Chautala’s Jannayak Janata Party which contested on the other 7 seats, performing dismally, AAP just secured 0.36 percent vote share in Haryana which also diminished its stakes for the 2019 assembly elections in the state.

Coming to 2024, before the seat-sharing agreement with its once bête noire and now fellow INDI alliance party, Congress, Kejriwal was boasting about AAP’s success in Haryana and declared back in January 2024 that AAP will contest all the 90 Vidhan Sabha seats for the upcoming assembly elections in Haryana alone, but the party will contest the 2024 lok sabha elections as a constituent of INDIA bloc. After the seat-sharing agreement with Congress in the state, it was declared that AAP would contest only for the Kurukshetra seat with the former Rajya Sabha member Sushil Gupta as its candidate. 

Out on interim bail since Friday evening, Kejriwal started campaigning for his party candidates the very next day and is expected to campaign for Sushil Gupta in Haryana’s Kurukshetra on May 14th with his Punjab counterpart Bhagwant Mann. While Sushil Gupta’s recent statement has stirred controversy in which he claimed that he is from the “Baniya” caste belonging to the village of “Jats”, he must be expecting that the AAP “messiah” Kejriwal will turn the fortunes in his favor. Interestingly, the Kurukshetra seat is one of the hot seats of Haryana where heavyweights like Naveen Jindal from BJP and Abhay Chautala from INLD are also contesting.

Looking at the political equations it is very unlikely that Kejriwal’s release and campaign in Kurukshetra will turn the tides for the party and INDI alliance in Haryana. Undoubtedly, Kejriwal is a big name in national politics but when it comes to a state like Haryana, where his party is still struggling to make its debut not only on the Lok Sabha seats but also in the state assembly where it secured just 0.48 percent votes even less than NOTA in 2019, Kejriwal’s plank of freebies and free hospital, school and water seems not working.

For the 2024 Lok Sabha elections Kejriwal is continuously attacking PM Modi and even after coming out of Jail on Friday, he said Modi wants the country to be ruled with a “One Nation, One Leader” theme. Kejriwal is continuously claiming that Indian democracy is in danger and PM Modi wants to impose dictatorship on the country. But Kejriwal’s statements seem mere rhetorics in the present moment as the Indian democracy seems in danger to him when the ED arrests him but he celebrates the decision of the apex court granting him bail just before two weeks of elections in Haryana and Delhi! Somebody should ask him, what kind of dictatorship is he talking about when the Prime minister couldn’t keep him behind bars for more than 50 days! To give a more picturesque explanation to Kejriwal’s claims, one must think about how can democracy be in danger in India, when the next in line Chief Justice of India Sanjeev Khanna, and his bench give him bail stating that “21 days will not make any difference”! In case, Kejriwal is saying for so many months had even an “ounce of truth”, Kejriwal would still be in Tihar and not in Connaught place visiting the Hanuman mandir and addressing crowds. 

Nonetheless, in order to secure some votes against the big fishes like Naveen Jindal and Abhay Chautala, Kejriwal, and AAP would require a more astute strategy to attract the locals rather than just playing the same rhetorics again and again. The probabilities of Kejriwal’s campaign changing tides for his party are very low but it will be interesting to see on what plank Kejriwal will ask the voters of Kurukshetra to vote for Sushil Gupta on May 14th.