Why Kiran Bedi badly needs help

Two weeks after she was paradropped into the Delhi election, her chief ministerial pitch has an amateurish feel

The view from behind Kiran Bedi’s shoulder, draped in the saffron and green of the Bharatiya Janata Party, should have been riveting and the atmosphere within the narrow confines of her jeep electrifying. But on both counts, her campaign did not make the cut on Thursday.

Getting on to the open jeep of Bedi, the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate for Delhi, wasn’t easy. She had decided, or had been instructed, after a series of gaffes (the latter explanation was popular with the disgruntled TV reporters trailing her), to keep the press at arms’ length. Thus, it needed persistence to find a seat in her vehicle while she was on a walkabout in a block of flats in Krishna Nagar, and to retain it after she and her gaggle of fellow travellers clambered on and resumed the road show. But it was pushiness poorly rewarded.

Narrow streets lined with tall, steep buildings could not make Bedi’s straggly cavalcade look larger than it was. The forced gaiety of ear-splitting drumbeats, fire crackers, and bhangra sessions by the same set of faces from gali to gali could not mask what appeared to be an already-tired campaign, and lukewarm public support. And, this was in the very constituency from which Bedi was contesting an election only about a week away.

Slogans do not make or break an election. But it is telling that the party which gave us “acche din” and “abki bar Modi sarkar” has failed to coin a single catchy slogan to ignite the campaign of Bedi, who is waging a neck-to-neck battle for the chief minister’s post with Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party. As Bedi, nursing a sore throat, confined herself to hoarse whispers, undertones, victory signs and clenched fists, her jeep-mates kept up a drone of plagiarised chants such as “ab ki bar Bedi sarkar” and promised safety for women at three-minute intervals.

Two weeks after she was paradropped into the Delhi election, why does Bedi’s chief ministerial campaign have such an amateurish feel to it? The jeep ride, lasting close to three hours, provided some clues. Those on the vehicle seemed to be divided into two categories, one best described as “Friends of Bedi”, and the other, party workers who had been drafted into the campaign. Since we were in Krishna Nagar, a constituency held by Delhi BJP leader Harsh Vardhan since 1993 before he gave it up to contest the Lok Sabha election last year, most were his staunch loyalists.

Bedi’s friends were unfailingly enthusiastic, both about her and, oddly, themselves. A prime example was the jeep’s driver, Akhilesh Sharma, who introduced himself as an ayurvedic doctor with a flourishing practice in the US. Sharma sprayed journalists with visiting cards and narrated, with little prompting, how he knew Bedi from the 1990s, when she had introduced alternative medicine in Tihar jail. Unable to squeeze a sound bite out of Bedi, desperate TV reporters picked up the bait and did desultory interviews with him.

On the other hand, the party workers exuded, at best, a confused willingness to oblige. At worst, it was a lack of chemistry with Bedi. As we waited on a mostly empty street in Geeta Colony for Bedi to arrive for her road show, they blamed the cold weather and the blaséness of Delhi voters, who liked to watch the elections on TV, and for the lack of buzz, despite repeated announcements. But they blamed the party, too, for launching Bedi at a short notice “and giving the poor woman the charge of winning all of Delhi”. In a roundabout way, they blamed the candidate, too. A woman councillor, who would later be raising full-throated slogans for Bedi on her jeep, said: “She is more an officer than a politician. If she doesn’t like something, she says it straight out; she does not clothe her remarks with politeness to keep the team happy.”

Too much an officer for workers not her own, but perhaps too much of a politician for old fans? Middle class residents of Muslim-dominated Taj Enclave in Geeta Colony, where Modi did a tour, radiated goodwill for her in her avatar as former cop and social activist, despite her BJP colours. But as Kaunain Akhtar, a software professional put it, citing her unwillingness to face a TV debate with Kejriwal, “She was a fearless lady, but the pressure of following the party line has made her soft.”

At 65, Bedi is five years older than Sheila Dikshit was when the latter contested her first election for the post of Delhi chief minister. However, with her erect shoulders, cropped hair, no-frills salwar kameez, severe jacket and sensible Nike shoes, she exudes a briskness that belies her age. What she seems to lack is political flair.

Kejriwal, into his third election, sounds less holier-than-thou than before, with a cultivated earthiness, a fund of slyly delivered jokes, effective use of minutiae such as prices of onions and carrots, diabetes and blood pressure medicines, and a frank admission that, okay, he got it badly wrong when he resigned. Bedi, into her first, comes across as earnest but humourless, dwelling overly on her storied past, fuzzy on issues on which she was once crystal clear, such as transparency in campaign financing, and lacking in political cunning while taking on rivals. This makes her easy prey for the media, which she, ironically, played expertly during her police career, never being more than a phone call away in an era in which there were no mobile phones.

After mocking Kejriwal this week for not being invited to the Republic Day Parade, Bedi had to hastily retreat when cornered by aggressive questioning. “Lesson to be learnt,” she said on prime time TV, sounding as sheepish as Bedi can sound (not very), “Never make a casual or funny remark.” When ribbed in the same programme for calling her new boss, Narendra Modi, “the world’s most beautiful face”, she said something that spoke volumes about her unpreparedness for electoral cut-and-thrust: “Another lesson learnt, how do you pick the right word?”

At her road show on Thursday, Bedi did do some of the things politicians are meant to. She picked up chubby babies with the purposefulness with which she once wielded lathis. She also added a Bedi touch by whipping out her BlackBerry and taking pictures of dangerous clusters of low-hanging tangled wires. But in a moment that Kejriwal would have milked, she seemed to fluff her lines. As an agitated young woman rushed towards her jeep, complaining vociferously about inflated electricity bills, a distracted Bedi briefly hugged and murmured, but did not do what she herself might have done at another time: Instruct an aide to take down details.

At the local party office after the road show, the talk was not about Bedi, but Modi’s January 31 rally at Shahadra. Piles of glossy new pamphlets had arrived to announce it, and were being distributed among workers. Statistics were being repeated around the press corps with expectation and awe — 22 ministers and 120 MPs from 13 states would be launching themselves on the Delhi campaign. Everybody seemed to be readying themselves for the descent of the big guns which, a morning with Kiran Bedi had made clear, was not coming a moment too soon.