— Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party national convener
Arvind Kejriwal speaks to Raj Chengappa, Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune Group of Newspapers
What are the lessons or the learning experience you have had from being in power the past month and a half?
One realises that there is no dearth of money; a lot of money is available with the government. What was happening was that big projects costing several hundred crore of rupees, which have absolutely no public utility, were being given out. When these projects are done they need huge amounts of money. But when you have people with the right kind of intentions, with an open mind, open to ideas, it is not rocket science to improve things. The second thing is that the vested interests are huge; they are all across — political, commercial, bureaucratic and even in the media. I’ll give you an instance: The Prevention of Corruption Act is being diluted in a major way. That Bill is being presented in Parliament, but no one in the media is talking about it. The media is busy wondering why Arvind has taken a three-bedroom house or a four-bedroom house; why has he changed his sweater, sandals. The entire effort is to make us fail. To show that we don’t know how to govern. Obviously, there are interests.
One of the impressions about you is that you are a man in a hurry, doing a lot of things in a short period. What is the strategy behind this? Do you believe the government would fall shortly, and you have to do all this before that happens?
But we don’t think we are doing anything in a hurry. It is just that we are working hard, and we must work hard. We made several mistakes, and in the beginning we were also saying that we were grateful to the media for pointing out our mistakes. We also took back some of our steps on the basis of the feedback. We always valued constructive criticism. But if anything went wrong, I don’t think speed was responsible for our bad judgement.
What were your mistakes?
Many. For instance, we set up the "janta darbar", it didn’t work out. When I get up in the morning, there are a lot of people standing outside my house and I meet them. I wanted to streamline that. So we decided that all the ministers will meet people once a week, and the rest of the days the officers will meet them. The idea was to meet the people personally. But the day we announced the idea, thousands of people came. We had made arrangements for 2,000-3,000 people, but 20,000 came. I think we should have studied models that have been implemented in other states before doing that. There are many such small steps that we had to take back. One obviously learns from that.
Did you expect you would come to power so quickly?
Three or four months before the elections it had become clear from the mood of the people that we were winning.
Source Link: http://www.tribuneindia.com
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