New Delhi,March 28: With the Aam Aadmi Party’s 320-member National Council all set to meet later on Saturday, senior party leader Yogendra Yadav on Saturday said the day will decide the future of one of the most extraordinary movements the country has witnessed.
“It’s an important day, the fate of the social movement out of which AAP was born, will be decided. It’s a day which will decide the future of one of the most extraordinary movements this country has witnessed. Whenever there’s a battle between power and passion, passion wins. We hope volunteers’ well wishes will not go waste.” said Yadav.
A senior party member told HT that the party’s break up cannot be ruled out.
Chances of a truce nosedived on Friday as dissident leaders Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav publicly accused party chief Arvind Kejriwal of stifling internal democracy and adopting unfair means to capture power, while the other camp hit back, alleging that the party veterans were trying to sabotage the two-year-old outfit.
Sources say while Kejriwal remains the party’s undisputed leader, voting on key issues at Saturday’s meeting may throw up some surprises. While 72 members of the AAP’s national council are from Delhi where the Kejriwal camp is strongest, the remaining 248 are from other states where Yadav has a robust support base.
Adding fuel to the bitter feud, an audio sting tape surfaced late in the evening in which Kejriwal is purportedly heard hurling invectives at Yadav and Bhushan, saying he was not interested in talking to them and that if needed he would quit AAP and float a new party with his 67 MLAs.
Analysts say if the tape is authentic, this shows that while the Delhi chief minister was publicly silent as the dispute was snowballing, he had probably made up his mind that there could be no reconciliation and the two senior leaders had to go.
Yadav and Bhushan alleged at a press conference that any issue raised by them was being projected as questioning Kejriwal’s leadership and attempts to remove him from the post of AAP’s national convenor.
The party that swept last month’s Delhi election has been torn between two camps, one supporting Kejriwal and the other comprising veterans like Yadav and Bhushan who have accused the chief minister of running things in a dictatorial way.
“Arvind once told me that he has never been in an organisation where his orders were not carried out,” said Bhushan, as he cited the state of emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi’s government and the 2002 Gujarat riots when Narendra Modi was chief minister. “They also thought their intentions were right.”
Yadav and Bhushan said they will quit all “executive posts” if the five demands they had placed before the leadership—including bringing the party under the ambit of the RTI Act, ordering a probe by the AAP’s ombudsman into allegations of wrongdoing and giving state units more autonomy— were met.
“We had sent a note to the party placing our demands which is now being shown as our resignation letter, whereas it was a conditional letter to resign. We had said if our five demands are met, we will resign from all party posts,” Yadav said.
Bhushan criticised Kejriwal, accusing him of trying to poach Congress legislators to form a government in Delhi last year.
“The national executive had rejected a proposal to form a government taking the support of the Congress. Despite that, Kejriwal sent a letter to the Lt Governor, asking him not to dissolve the assembly,” the Supreme Court lawyer said.
The Kejriwal camp struck back minutes later, saying Yadav and Bhushan were attempting to damage the party and discredit it with baseless allegations.
“They made efforts so that the party loses (the Delhi election)… they told workers that let the party lose, it will be easy to remove Arvind,” AAP member Ashish Khetan said at a press meet.
“There was a reason why it was decided to remove two senior leaders of the party from the PAC. It was unanimously decided that internal matters of party should not be discussed publicly.”
Party colleague Sanjay Singh also denied Bhushan’s charge that the rebels’ demands were not being met.
“We had agreed on some issues and discussions were going on in others. He said that the party should be brought under the RTI. He said that volunteers should have a say in the party’s decisions. We agreed on that,” Singh said at the media briefing.
