Aam Aadmi Party has questions to answer
The death of a farmer from Rajasthan at a rally the Aam Aadmi Party had organised in Delhi on Wednesday, is tragic. What is unfortunate is the politics that leaders and parties, especially the AAP, have indulged in, since the incident. AAP leaders, taking a cue from Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, have been blaming Delhi Police personnel for being silent spectators. Mr Kejriwal claimed that he had been repeatedly appealing from the dais for the police to act before anything untoward happened, but the police did not respond. While an inquiry the Centre has ordered into the incident will shed light on the truth, it remains uncontested that Mr Kejriwal knew of the attempt the farmer, Gajendra Singh Kalyanwat, was making to end his life. Indeed, the man had been for hours threatening to commit suicide. AAP leaders later went on to say that Mr Kejriwal had not actually seen the man trying to end his life, but had been informed by others.
In the first place, Gajendra Singh Kalyanwat hanged himself in full public view from a tree at a stone’s throw distance from the dais where the Delhi Chief Minister and other AAP leaders were giving their address. So, it is unlikely that Mr Kejriwal was not witness to the scene. And, even if he had been informed and not seen it first hand, he ought to have alerted his volunteers present at the venue, to take pre-emptive steps. There are two reasons why Mr Kejriwal has opted to pass the buck. The first is that he does not want to be tainted by the death — already questions have been raised on why he continued with the speech despite being informed of the incident and of the fact that the victim had been taken to the hospital in a critical state —because that would take the sheen off his newly cultivated pro-farmer image. The second reason is that, since Delhi Police reports to the Union Government, he decided to exploit the occasion to target the Centre. leader after leader from the AAP appeared on television to condemn Delhi Police personnel for their ‘failure’.
Their eagerness to score brownie points even in the death of a person becomes clear by the fact that only an inquiry into the incident can establish whether the police had failed. From available accounts, though, it is clear that, while police personnel were not close to the scene as they were stationed in the outer perimeters, AAP leaders, and many of their supporters and volunteers, certainly were. They did nothing. Instead, some of them displayed utter sensitivity post-incident in their remarks, with one spokesperson derisively asking whether Mr Kejriwal should have climbed up the tree to save the farmer.
In the midst of the tragic development, facts have been twisted by politicians who are out to milk the issue. They have been holding the Union Government’s land acquisition Bill responsible for the incident. Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, who visited the hospital where the farmer had been rushed to, claimed that “all this happened because of the Government’s land acquisition Ordinance”. But Gajendra Singh Kalyanwat’s suicide has nothing to do with the Ordinance or the pending Bill which the Congress is opposing. He ended his life, if one goes by the suicide note he left behind, because he saw no hope of being able to repay the loans he had taken for farming, after his crops were destroyed by untimely rain and hailstorm.