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When I first learnt that you had parted company with Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and had joined Amit Shah’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), my instant reaction was: Et tu, Brutus. On calmer reflection, I am inclined to say: Thank You, Raghav.

Thank you for applying the final closure to one of the most exciting as well as most diabolical tricks that was played on our collective innocence in post-Independent India. From Jantar Mantar to Ashoka Road/Deen Dayal Upadhaya Marg is a short distance but it is a politically long journey you have made. There is no doubt it must have been an agonising decision to climb aboard Modi’s leaking ship; but it was the only choice, in fact, a very natural choice, before you.

I remember meeting you nearly a decade ago in Chandigarh when you were trying to implant the AAP flag in Punjab. I was struck by your idealism and – pardon me – by your naivety. You were so obviously an intelligent man yet failed to grasp the basic contradiction between the Idea of AAP and Kejriwal’s AAP. The Idea of AAP was premised on a notion, a faith, a hope that it was possible to excise parliamentary politics of its abundant impurities. Kejriwal’s AAP was – and remains – a project that seeks to pursue bourgeois politics, with its inherently unsatisfactory outcomes. AAP never had a revolutionary purpose.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

The primary reason the idea of AAP got destroyed by the Kejriwal mob is that the very birth of AAP was baptised in........

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