INDIA HONEST has seen lot of changes in the Arvind Kejriwal of Anna's IAC movement of 2012-13, and agrees with Saubhik Chakrabarti's timely observation that "public is turning its face away from Arvind Kejriwal " in this Loksabha Election 2014.
SC said, "Arvind Kejriwal has met those who assaulted him; meetings that are supposed to tell us Kejriwal can forgive the unforgivable, that he's above the fray, and therefore so untypical a politician.
But there's bad news for AAP. Assuming nothing but purest motives on Kejriwal's part, the message is playing out differently - the revolutionary who was going to change our system is increasingly looking like an actor in a prolonged, low grade street theatre."
IH obviously agrees with him that all this may be good for afternoon news TV that needs any drama to fill up the hours before evening's studio shouting matches start. But the highly media-conscious AAP should know that what's sending afternoon TV anchors into raptures is making its leader lose sheen.
SC concluded truly that "public perception built on Kejriwal as a challenger worked till he seemed to be articulating 'people's frustrations'. Kejriwal's programme was never as unproblematic as this perception suggested - but there's no denying he got that message across.
INDIA HONEST finds little to differ with him in, "It started going wrong when Kejriwal expanded the scope of the message. AAP probably thought Kejriwal taking on what it portrayed as a business-politics nexus will go down marvellously with the aam aadmi.Sadly AAP thought it wrong.
Yes, IH felt "modi, rahul in pocket of ambani" renascent slogan was good enough for clapping among die hard AAP cap wearing supporters, but little for ultimate consumption for public mindset, and SC summarised it well as,"We instinctively respond to what's immediate. We react differently, less emotively to the more abstract. This sounds obvious.
But then, the interesting question is why AAP didn't see the obvious. A message about citizens being harassed by powerful entities is one thing. A message about powerful entities allegedly helping each other is another thing entirely - it can't fire up masses unless there's a simple-to-understand smoking gun.AAP's allegations had no such simple-to-understand smoking gun. Plus, they were repetitive to the point of being exhaustively boring."
INDIA HONEST has no hesitation in concluding that Arvind has been misled by the high TRP within his dedicated AAP cap wearing supporters, who had little sense to ovulate and took everything on face value. Even the knowledgeable banker Merra Sanyal has to back on her blogs and tweets on Gujarat development , once she worn AAP cap.
IH regrets that it was one "topi" that Arvind failed to put on the head of intelligent public, the people suspicion on him deepened and that resulted in Arvind's climbdown on aam admi trust ladder.
Yes ,IH agrees Arvind now looked more like someone who just wants headlines. Fighting Modi in Varanasi has nothing to do with speaking for ordinary citizens, it has everything to do with making Kejriwal look grand - that's how it's playing out.The slide down seems to be accelerating by each passing day and slap/ink incident.