Arvind Kejriwal

Investing lessons from Aam Aadmi Party’s Delhi win

Arvind-Kejriwal3
Last week saw David(read the Aam Aadmi Party(AAP)) beat Goliath(read the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)) in the Delhi elections. AAP won 67 out of the seventy seats in the Delhi assembly, leaving only three seats for the BJP. This led to one WhatsApp forward which suggested that Delhi should now allow tripling(three people travelling on a bike) so that BJP legislators could ride to the Delhi assembly on a bike. Another forward suggested that the BJP legislators could drive to the assembly in a Tata Nano.
Jokes apart, in the aftermath of this electoral debacle many reasons have been offered on why and how the BJP lost Delhi. Reasons have also been offered on why and how the AAP won Delhi. Let’s sample a few here. The ghar wapasi campaign launched by the Sangh Parivar backfired in Delhi. The BJP ran a very negative and a highly vitriolic campaign against AAP and that didn’t quite work.
The AAP supporters on the other hand have been pointing out to the fact that the party ran a positive campaign and that went down well with Delhi residents. Further, the 49 days that Arvind Kejriwal was chief minister of Delhi, the levels of petty corruption in Delhi had come down dramatically. And this, we are told, is something that the people of Delhi haven’t forgotten.
Long story short—the number of reasons offered on AAP’s spectacular performance and BJP’s wipe out, is directly proportional to the number of political pundits analysing the issue. Nevertheless, most of these reasons have been offered with the benefit of hindsight. Most political pundits had no clue about BJP ending with up three seats and the Narendra Modi juggernaut losing steam. But now that it has happened, they need to find reasons and explanations for the same.
As Gary Smith writes in Standard Deviations—Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics: “Through countless generations of natural selection, we have become hardwired to look for patterns and to think of explanations for the patterns we find…We yearn to make an uncertain world more certain, to gain control over things we do not control, to predict the unpredictable.”
Also, some political pundits have now even said that they saw the whole thing coming and offered explanations of the same. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness: “Things are always obvious after the fact…It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information…Our mind will interpret most events not with the preceding ones in mind, but the following ones.” This tendency is referred to as hindsight bias in psychology.
Daniel Kahneman defines this in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: “When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate that surprise…Once you adopt a new view of the world(or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe in before your mind changed.”
This leads to a situation where one feels that one has understood as well as predicted the past and given that one further feels that one can predict as well as control the future. As Jason Zweig writes in Your Money & Your Brain—How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich: “Hindsight bias is another cruel trick that your inner con man plays on you. By making you believe that the past was more predictable than it really was, hindsight bias fools you into thinking that the future is more predictable than it ever can be.”
This is exploited in particular by financial pundits. As Kahneman writes: “Our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events. And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday.” That of course is not the case.
Hindsight bias also is also at work when we invest. An excellent example, is of investors saying after a bubble has burst, that they knew all along it was a bubble. But the thing is that if a bubble is obvious to enough investors at the time it is in its initial stage, there would be no bubble in the first place.
Zweig has an excellent example in his book of the link between hindsight bias and investing. As he writes: “In the fall of 2001, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, you tell yourself, “Nothing will ever be the same again. The U.S. isn’t safe any more. Who knows what they’ll do next? Even if stocks are cheap, nobody will have the guts to invest.” Then the market goes on to gain 15% by the end of 2003, and what do you say? “I knew
stocks were cheap after September 11th!””
The moral of the story here is that you may have been able to explain the entire situation to yourself, but you have missed out on the rally.
Then there is the case of missing out on a bumper initial public offering. Zweig offers the case of Google which first sold its shares in August 2004. At that point of time, an investor wanting to invest in the stock, would have thought back about the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the money that he had lost back then.
Using this logic he would have decided not to invest in the stock. He would have then seen the price of the stock jump from the initial price of $85 to $460 by end 2006 and told himself: “I knew I should have bought Google!”
And this would lead to a change in the worldview of the investor and may well make him “more eager to take the plunge” the next time he has “a chance to get in on the ground floor of a risky high-tech start-up.” But as Zweig puts it: “Of course, “the next Google” may turn out to be the next Enron instead.”
Given these reasons it is very important for investors not to become victims of the hindsight bias while investing.

(The article originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com as a part of The Daily Reckoning on Feb 16, 2015)

One lesson from many lessons offered on BJP’s Delhi defeat

narendra_modiA small industry seems to have evolved around trying to explain why the Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP) lost the Delhi elections. A spate of reasons have been offered. One gentleman even went to the extent of saying that it was a weekend, and the BJP voters were not in Delhi.
And then there have been regular reasons like the fringe elements in the Sangh Parivar and the comments they have been making, costing BJP the election. It was also said that the BJP ran a very negative campaign in Delhi, where they targeted Arvind Kejriwal more often than they should have.
Some political pundits have done a complete turnaround and been telling us that they knew all along that the BJP would lose big time in Delhi. The best explanation for this came on one of the Hindi news channels on the day when votes polled for the Delhi election were being counted.
A journalist explained that he had covered the prime minister Narendra Modi’s rallies in Delhi and they did not attract the same kind of crowd that they had when the BJP organized rallies with Modi as the star speaker, at the time of the Lok Sabha elections. He further explained that he saw people leaving the rally even before Modi’s speech had ended. And that was a clear habinger of things to come.
The question is—if this journalist was so sure about all this, why didn’t he say so at the time the rallies were held. Or even other analysts and journalists who have been coming up with different reasons for BJP’s loss in Delhi—if they were so sure, why didn’t they say so earlier?
The “I already told you so,” explanations that have been offered in the aftermath of BJP’s Delhi defeat are an excellent example of what psychologists and behavioural economists call “hindsight bias”.
The Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman defines hindsight bias in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, as follows: “When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate that surprise…A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world(or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe in before your mind changed.”
Hindsight bias is also referred to as “I knew it all along effect”. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness: “Our minds are not quite desinged to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny. If they were made for us to understand things, then we would have machine in it that would run the past history as in a VCR, with a correct chronology, and it would slow us down so much that we would have trouble operating. Psychologists call this overestimation of what one knew at the time of the event due to subsequent information…the “I knew it all along” effect.”
This bias is clearly at work in the explanations that are now being offered for BJP’s shocking defeat in Delhi. One explanation that has been offered is that the freebies/sops offered by the Aam Aadmi Party, essentially led to BJP’s wipe out. But if that were the case then Ashok Gehlot would not have lost in Rajasthan and neither would have M Karunanidhi, the last time they faced the electorate. Oh, and what about Sonia Gandhi? If it were just about offering freebies to voters, would the Congress have been reduced to 44 seats in the current Lok Sabha?
This brings us back to the question, why did the BJP lose so badly in Delhi? One answer lies in the fact that the vote share of the Congress party collapsed and it moved lock, stock and barrel to the Aam Aadmi Party. Why did this vote share not move to the BJP? This is where all the explanations start to come in. But almost all these theories are a matter of conjecture because nobody really knows what’s going on in the minds of a huge number of voters.
The human mind likes explanations for what it does not understand. As Gary Smith writes in Standard Deviations—Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics: “Our inherited desire to explain what we see fuels two kinds of cognitive errors. First, we are too easily seduced by patterns and by the theories and discount contradicting evidence. We believe stories simply because they are consistent with the patterns we observe and, once we have a story, we are reluctant to let it go.”
In the context of the Delhi elections what this means is that if you are a BJP supporter you would like to believe that the BJP lost because the Aam Aadmi Party offered freebies to voters. If you are an Aam Aadmi Party supporter you would like to believe that the party won because of the positive campaign that it ran. But as Smith points out: “Order is more comforting than chaos…Our vulnerability comes from a deep desire to make sense of the world, and it’s notoriously hard to shake off.”
Further, the more unpredicted an event is, the greater is the hindsight bias. Kahneman explains this through the example of 9/11. As he writes: “In the case of a catastrophe, such as 9/11, we are especially ready to believe that the officials who failed to anticipate were negligent or blind.”
On July 10, 2001, the CIA received information that al-Qaeda was planning an attack on the United States. The CIA director George Tenet told the National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and not President George Bush.
When Ben Bradlee the legendary executive editor of The Washington Post came to know of it, he remarked: “It seems to me elementary that if you’ve got the story that’s going to dominate history you might as well go right to the president.” This is classic hindsight bias.
As Kahneman writes: “But on July 10, no one knew—or could have known—that this tidbit of intelligence would turn out to dominate history.”
Long story short—it is always easy to be wise after the event. And that is what is happening with all the lessons/explanations that have been offered for BJP’s defeat in Delhi.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on Feb14, 2015

Story of a home-grown David: How AAP trumped the mighty

Arvind-Kejriwal3 
Vivek Kaul  
One of the fundamental rules of forecasting is to make as many forecasts as possible and then publicise the ones you get right. On August 4, 2012, I wrote a piece on Firstpost, in which I compared what would become Aam Aadmi Party(AAP) to a disruptive innovation.
The term disruptive innovation was coined by Clayton Christensen, who happens to be a professor of strategy at Harvard Business School. He defines it as “innovations that transform an existing market or create a new one by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility and affordability. It is initially formed in a narrow foothold market that appears unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents.”
A great example of a disruptive innovation is Micromax. Micromax and a host of other Indian phone makers built up significance presence in the smartphone market, while the biggest player Nokia was busy elsewhere.
Bharti Beetel, which produced India’s first landline phones which had buttons on them, did not wake to the opportunity of the mobile phone market. This despite the fact that its sister company Airtel was India’s biggest mobile phone service provider.
RCA, America’s leading radio company, did not see the rise of battery powered pocket transistors which were first made by Sony in 1955. Sony changed the way the world heard music by launching the Walkman and the CDman. But it handed over the digital music player market on a platter to Apple and other companies. Sony did not capture the mp3 player market because it feared that it would play havoc with all the music rights that it owned.
When it comes to low cost airlines Southwest Airlines first woke up to the opportunity. None of the bigger players in the market like Pan American, British Airways, Lufthansa, Delta etc, saw the opportunity at that point of time. Even in an Indian case, a rank outsider Indigo has captured the low cost market, instead of incumbents like Air India and Jet Airways, which continue to make huge losses.
There are scores of such examples in business, where the biggest player(or players) in the market has been rattled by a new player. AAP is a similar disruptive innovator. In the August 2012 piece, I had said that what “works to the advantage of disruptive innovators is the fact that the major players in the market ignore them initially and do not take them as a big enough force that deserves attention.”
And this works to the advantage of the disruptive innovator, which can quietly keep doing its thing. The bigger player is not interested because the market that the disruptive innovator is catering to is too small for them to take seriously. Take the case of smartphones. Smartphones have been around since the late 1990s, but they only took off in the last few years. Hence, Nokia never got around to take them very seriously.
When Sony first launched pocket transistors they catered primarily to teenagers. This led to RCA ignoring the market, because the bigger market was elsewhere. Apple’s first personal computers were targeted towards the youth, leading to the existing players who manufactured minicomputers ignoring the market completely.
Along similar lines, the Bhartiya Janata Party and the Congress, looked at AAP as a party which catered to the frustrations of the middle class. And given that the middle class in this country does not care to vote, the existing political parties felt that there was no point in paying attention to what the AAP was upto.
In fact, Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of Delhi for the last fifteen years said so in several interviews. In an interview to the Open magazine published in early November, Dikshit said that “he(i.e. Arvind Kejriwal, the National Convener of the AAP) is not even on our radar.” In a rally without referring to Kejriwal, she even called him ‘barsaat ka keeda’.In another interview to Tehelka, Dikshit said “My reaction to the Aam Aadmi Party is nothing..absolutely nothing.” By the time Congress woke up to the threat from the AAP, it reacted the only way it could, by ordering a probe into the foreign funding sources of the party.
The Bhartiya Janata Party also woke up around mid October, six weeks before the election, and decided to project Dr Harshvardhan as its chief ministerial candidate. As the India Today reported on the issue “Highly-placed sources in the BJP have told indiatoday.in that the party wanted to go into the elections with a leader who had a clean image and that made it go with the doctor.”
The only possible explanation for this change is the fact that the BJP came to realise slightly late in the day, that the AAP was no pushover. Hence, it had to project a chief ministerial candidate with a clean image. And this got Dr Harshvardhan into the picture.
The fact that it wasn’t taken seriously by its opponents allowed the AAP to go about building itself right from scratch in Delhi. The results suggest that what the AAP has managed to do in a small span of a little over a year is unprecedented. No other political party established right from scratch has ever won the number of seats that it has, since independence, in its very first election.
On various discussions that happened across television channels yesterday political analysts brought up the example of NT Rama Rao. NT Rama Rao stormed to power by winning the January 1983 assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh. His Telgu Desam Party won 199 out of the 294 assembly seats. In comparison, AAP’s performance looks pale.
But its worth remembering here that NT Rama Rao was the biggest Telgu film-star at that point of time. He may have been contesting elections for the first time, but everyone in Andhra Pradesh knew who he was. And given how crazy Andhra Pradesh was and continues to be about cinema, NTR did not have to start right from scratch like AAP did in Delhi.
Some others also compared AAP’s success to the defeat that Mamata Banerjee handed out to the Left Front in West Bengal in 2011. While what Mamata did was huge, it is worth remembering that it took her almost three decades to do that. And when she moved out of the Congress Party to form the Trinamool Congress, a large section of the Congress Party moved with her. This meant that there was some sort of organisation that was present at the ground level when Mamata seriously thought of taking on the Left parties on her own.
When the success of AAP is looked at with these factors in mind, it really is unprecedented.
Another point that comes out here is what marketing gurus Al and Laura Ries make in their book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR. In the last few decades the biggest brands have been made through public relations and not through advertising. As Al Ries told me in a October 2008 interview that I did for the Daily News and Analysis (DNA) “Almost all of the recent brand successes have been public relations (PR) successes, not advertising successes…In its first 10 years, Starbucks spent less than $10 million (total) on advertising which is a small amount in a country of 300 million people. The Body Shop has never advertised. Yet recently, L’Oreal paid $1.1 billion to buy the company…Red Bull today is a worldwide brand with $3.3 billion in annual sales, yet the company does little advertising. Same is true about Google, Facebook, Twitter, which are now some of the biggest brands in the world.”
In fact, the success of AAP is a very good example of the same. The party did not have enough money to go through the conventional advertising route of advertising on television and in newspapers. They came up with innovative ways of advertising which did not need a lot of money, like getting their volunteers to stand with banners of the party at strategic traffic points. They also advertised on autorickshaws, which was a cheap and effective way of reaching a large number of people.
In fact, they got spectacular coverage in the media by exposing corruption in business and crony capitalism. Arvind Kejriwal and the AAP were on the front pages of newspapers all over the country, for fairly long periods of time, over the last one year due to this. In the end, this strategy was overused, businessmen cracked the whip and finally a large section of the media stopped covering there exposures. The door to door campaign in Delhi that it carried out was also a spectacular public relations exercise.
As I said earlier, the big boys never really took the AAP seriously. They asked all the practical questions. Where would the AAP raise all the money to fight an election? How would they be able to put an effective organisation in place, in such a short period of time? How would they manage to achieve all that we have achieved in the last sixty to hundred years, in a period of one year?
The party did this and a lot more.
It raised money directly from people, something that has been unheard of in Indian politics. The party also innovated when it came to reaching out to people, something expected from a disruptive innovator. It organised small mohalla sabhas attended by a few hundred people at a time, all across Delhi. Of course, existing political parties used to large rallies, did not see much worth in organising events where at best a few hundred people turned up.
The AAP also used social media very effectively when it came to drumming up support, something no one other than Narendra Modi, has tried to do.
The question is will the AAP be able to replicate its success in Delhi through other parts of the country? The answer is not simple. The incumbent politicians would like to believe that it will be very difficult for the AAP to play the game of caste so important in large parts of the country.
But what should give them hope is the fact that the larger political parties are still not taking them seriously. A senior BJP leader said on NDTV India yesterda that comparing BJP with AAP was like comparing “Raja Bhoj with Gangu Teli”. Another BJP leader challenged them to win even a single seat out of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharasthra.
This tells us that the incumbent politicians are still not taking AAP seriously and feel that they will find it difficult to replicate their success outside Delhi. How successful AAP is outside Delhi, only time will tell us.
To conclude, AAP’s spectacular debt in Indian democracy was best summarised by anchor Punya Prasun Bapai on Aaj Tak yesterday, when he said “Jhadu, Tiranga Ke Saath Lehra Raha Hai”.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 9, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

What Micromax is to Nokia, Kejriwal’s AAP is to Dikshit

Arvind-Kejriwal3Vivek Kaul 

It is never really a great idea to compare a political party to a management concept, given that politics is more messier than business ever can be. But that is what I had done, over a year back, when a section of what had come to be known as Team Anna, decided to form a political party.
I had compared the Aam Aadmi Party (as it subsequently came to be known) to a disruptive innovation (You can read the article here).
Disruptive innovation is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. “These are innovations that transform an existing market or create a new one by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility and affordability. It is initially formed in a narrow foothold market that appears unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents,” is how Christensen defines disruptive innovations as.
The business landscape is littered with examples of hundreds of disruptive innovations. It typically involves a small entrepreneur coming up with a product which big business of the day is not interested in. A good recent example is that of Indian mobile phone brands like Micromax and Karbonn, which took on Nokia, which was the biggest mobile phone brand in India until a few years.
The Indian brands concentrated on selling low priced smart phones, mostly sourced from China, something that Nokia was not interested in. This allowed the Indian brands to gradually capture a major section of the market. By the time, Nokia woke up, these small Indian businesses had already become big boys. Micromax recently signed Hollywood star Hugh Jackman as its brand ambassador. (To its credit Samsung did not fall into the Nokia trap and is now the leading mobile phone brand in India)
Another great example of a disruptive innovation, which I have often used and which fits the situation beautifully in this case, is that of home grown detergent Nirma. 
Karsanbhai Patel introduced Nirma detergent in 1969 and priced it at Rs 3.50 per kg. Those were the days when soaps were more popular than detergents when it came to washing clothes. A major reason for this was the fact that detergents were expensive. Hindustan Lever’s Surf (now Hindustan Unilever) sold at Rs 15 per kg. And the lowest price detergent was sold at Rs 13.50 per kg. 
Given this huge disparity in price, Nirma sold well and continued to grow. Hindustan Lever kept looking the other way for a very long time simply because it was not interested in servicing the end of the market where the margins were low. By the time Hindustan Lever reacted, Nirma had established itself as a pan India brand. 
Hence, there are two ends to a disruptive innovation really. One is the new business which launches something which caters to a specific section of the market. The other is the established big business which is not really interested in that section of the market. This allows the new business to grow itself. By the time big business starts to see the smaller business as a threat, it has already grown big enough. The disruptive innovation thus challenges the status quo product. 
Along similar lines, Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party are the disruptive innovation, and the existing political parties the status quo product. To their credit Arvind Kejriwal and his supporters understood that urban voters wanted a change and tailored their campaign in line with that. They understood that there was an opportunity for a political party which fields honest candidates and does not work along narrow caste or regional lines.
This basic idea seems to have worked. A pre-poll survey carried out by CNN-IBN, The Week and CSDS Pre-Poll has projected that the Aam Aadmi Party will get anywhere between 19-25 seats in the upcoming Delhi assembly elections. It gives the Bhartiya Janata Party anywhere between 22 to 28 seats and the Congress party 19 to 25 seats in a 70 member Delhi assembly. 
If AAP were to get even one third or half of the projected seats, it would be unprecedented. No political party established from scratch has ever done so well. 
So what has worked for the Aam Aadmi Party? There promise of providing a clean corruption free administration has gone down well with the Delhi voters. Cynics might turn around and tell you, what is the big deal about that? Every political party worth its salt promises a corruption free administration. 
While that is true, a promise of a corruption free administration coming from politicians who are already corrupt, does not mean anything for the voter. When the same promise comes from someone like Arvind Kejriwal, an IITian who worked for the Indian Revenue Service, and then quit to run an NGO, it holds some value. It tells the voter that there is still some hope left in the world. Hence, more than the message, who is saying it, turns out to be more important.
The other factor that worked well for Aam Aadmi Party is the fact that the big boys Congress and Bhartiya Janata Party were looking the other way, like often happens in the case of a disruptive innovation. 
The big boys never really took the Aam Aadmi Party seriously. The feeling was that where would this new kid on the block raise the money required to fight an election? How would the new party put the organisation required to fight an election in place? 
The Aam Aadmi Party turned the conventional wisdom right on its head when it came to raising money. It has been raising money directly from the people. As far as setting up the party organisation is concerned it has done a remarkably good job in a very short period of time. 
The party has also innovated when it comes to reaching out to people. It has been organising small mohalla sabhas attended by a few hundred people at a time, all across Delhi. The existing political parties, used to big rallies, have not seen this as a threat. This has helped the party consolidate its position all across Delhi. 
The Aam Aadmi Party has also been innovative when it comes to advertising, using auto-rickshaws as well as humans standing with banners at key junctions in Delhi.
Also, the existing political parties were confident that it would be next to impossible to reach the voter in such a short period of time. In this case the Aam Aadmi Party has been helped by the media, for which Kejriwal and his party have been a new and an exciting story, full of hope. And hope always sells well among readers. What has also worked is the fact that Kejriwal has been extremely media savvy, always willing to give an interview.
All this has clearly rattled the Bhartiya Janata Party and the Congress. In a recent interview to the Tehelka magazine, chief minister Sheila Dikshit
of the Congress Party said “My reaction to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is nothing..absolutely nothing.” Only a person who is rattled could have said that. The Bhartiya Janata Party has been forced to project Dr Harshvardhan, as its chief ministerial candidate, instead of going in with its Delhi unit chief Vijay Goel . It’s obvious that the party wanted to project someone with a clean image to take on Kejriwal. But it left that decision to very late in the day.
What has worked well for the Aam Aadmi Party is the fact that Delhi votes majorly along class lines and not caste lines. Its real test will come when it starts contesting elections in other states, where caste and other political factors will have a major role to play.

The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on October 31, 2013

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

Why Arvind Kejriwal should continue copy pasting


Vivek Kaul
Delhi based journalists who cover politics have been at their wits ends trying to explain and understand this phenomenon called Arvind Kejriwal. They have never seen an animal like him before. And since they don’t understand him, they tend to run him down.
What is new in what Kerjiwal is saying is their constant complaint. All this was already in the public domain is a point they often make. Take the case of the links between Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, and DLF, the biggest listed real estate company in India. The moment Kejriwal started talking about the link, several journalists who work for Delhi headquartered newspapers and television channels were everywhere trying to tell us that all this was already reported by The Economic Times in a story that appeared in March 2011.
They were of course right about the same. But the question is even with The Economic Times, the largest business daily in India and the second largest business daily writing about the link between DLF and Vadra, how many Indians actually knew about it?
But when Arvind Kejriwal went to town with the issue it was reported on almost every news channel in English and Hindi, and almost every newspaper in the country (except a particular Delhi based broadsheet) had it as the lead story on the front page the next day. And that being the case every Indian who gives any newspaper even a customary glance came to know about the issue.
Yes the link between Vadra and DLF was in the public domain. But it was in the limited public domain. The Economic Times despite having the size it has is only the seventh largest read English daily in the country. The biggest vernacular papers have a circulation which is any times the circulation that of The Economic Times. Hence, with Arvind Kejriwal and India Against Corruption exposing the links between Vadra and DLF, the issue was placed on the national agenda.
What also happened was that once Kejriwal went to town with the issue, newspapers and television channels got more courage to report on the issue and dug up more dirt. A story in The Hindu brought to our notice that how an honest IAS officer Ashok Khemka was transferred for poking holes in the dealings between Vadra and DLF. Several newspapers and websites reported how DLF gave Vadra a Rs 50 crore advance, which remained with Vadra for more than three years. Vadra used this interest free money to go on a property buying spree.
This advance was given against a plot of land of 3.5 acres that Vadra bought for Rs 7.5 crore and within months sold it to DLF for Rs 58 crore.  The Business Standard reported that the Haryana chief minister might Bhupinder Singh Hooda have had more than helped Vadra in this initial purchase of this 3.5 acres. Also for this purchase Vadra issued a cheque of Rs 7.5 crore without even having 1% of that money in his bank account. This was done with the help of the seller who was close to Hooda not encashing the cheque immediately.
The Daily News and Analysis reported that a part of the advance was used to buy up land in Bikaner which went up in price by 40 times since Vadra first started purchasing plots of lands in 2009. The point being that once Kejriwal raised the issue several media houses unearthed more and more angles to the basic story of the link up between Vadra and DLF. This happened because once Kejriwal raised the issue it came from being in the limited public domain (as it was when reported by The Economic Times) to being in the full public domain.
The same thing happened when Kejriwal placed Nitin Gadkari, the president of the Bhartiya Janata Party on the block. Once Kejriwal raised the issue about Gadkari indulging in corruption the same set of journalists went to town saying that there is nothing new in what Kejriwal is saying. It is all there in the public domain.  But Kejriwal’s expose led to newspapers unearthing more and more muck about Gadkari and firmly showed that his claims of being a social entrepreneur were all a one big hogwash.
The same model was followed after Kejriwal attacked Reliance. Several editors of business news channels and business newspapers were seen on prime time television right after Kejriwal’s press conference trying to tell the world at large that their newspaper or television channel had already reported extensively on the issue of Reliance first agreeing to a certain price for KG D6 gas and then wanting a substantially higher price for it.
This of course was true. But then how many people read business newspapers in this country? The answer is around 1.5million, which is around 0.13% of India’s population. Does that even qualify as being in the public domain?
And let’s not even get into the television rating points of business news channels. They are a joke.
As Gyan Chaturvedi wrote in the brilliant satire Narak Yatra
इस देश में लिखे को पढता कौन है?
लिखते रहो सालो.
कितने पढेंगे.
कितने पढ़े-लिखे हैं इस देश में?
और पढ़े लिखों में भी कितने पढ़ते हैं?
और जो पढ़ते हैं, उनमें से कितने समझते हैं?
और जो समझते हैं,उन्हें सोचने की फुर्सत कहाँ हैं?
वे महंगाई, दफ्तर तथा बीवी-बच्चों के पचड़ों में ही मर खप रहे हैं.
बाकी देश तो अनपढ़ है ही,पढ़े-लिखों का भी डर नहीं.
So given that, yes, Arvind Kejriwal is copy pasting from what has already been reported in the media before (though I have my differences on this having written extensively on the link between Vadra and DLF, what Kejriwal and his team put together on the issue was much more than what was reported in The Economic Times March 2011 story). Nevertheless, it is his copy pasting that is really putting out these issues in the real public domain and not the one created by television news channels and business newspapers.
And hence it’s important that he continues.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])