It is nearly evening and at the Siwani Anaj Mandi an animated Girdhar Lal Bansal is busy playing cards with five men from the village. He chides them for cheating and reshuffles the cards for the next game. But as the conversation shifts to his nephew Arvind Kejriwal, Bansal falls silent. “He was an honest man and rose to power due to his principles. Now he is in jail, as are Sisodia and Sanjay (Manish Sisodia and Sanjay Singh). They spoke against Narendra Modi and they arrested him,” says the 70-year-old, who is one of the three brothers of the Delhi Chief Minister’s father Gobind Ram. He lives with family in Gurgaon now and travels to Siwani in Haryana’s Bhiwani district, 170 km from the national capital, by bus every month to check on his house and ancestral land. Kejriwal, Bansal says, was born in the village on August 16, 1968, but left at an early age for schooling in Hisar. “He would come often, but after assuming the post of the CM, the visits also dropped. Three years ago, he visited Siwani for an event at the local temple,” he says. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader is the fourth CM from Bhiwani, the others being Haryana CMs Bansi Lal, Banarsi Das Gupta, and Master Hukam Singh. Among the locals in his ancestral village, there is palpable discontentment as some say he has not visited them enough since becoming Delhi CM. His arrest in the Delhi liquor policy case also has some of the villagers questioning him. Jagdish Prasad Kedia, a businessman, says the villagers had high hopes for Kejriwal. “We were proud that someone from our village left his job to work against corruption and later became a chief minister. Around 50 of us from the village went to Delhi to watch the swearing-in ceremony in February 2015. Three years ago, we went to ask him for donations for an event at a temple, he paid a visit and left after an hour. He did not visit the mandi, talk to people or even donate. Many of us were disillusioned,” says the 65-year-old. Kedia says he is not convinced about Kejriwal’s innocence. “Even after repeated ED (Enforcement Directorate) summons, he did not go for interrogation. It does not add up.” Somnath Sharma who runs a general store at the Anaj Mandi says Kejriwal runs a good government and has made the lives of people easier in the Capital. But he is disappointed that the AAP could not flourish in Haryana. “The party will win again in Delhi, this time people will vote for INDIA in Lok Sabha, too, but they won’t win in Haryana even though they have only one seat in Kurukshetra. There is a unit in Siwani but that has not taken off since 2015. When Arvind doesn’t even visit his birthplace, how will the party grow?” says the 60-year-old. Anup Sharma, a labourer at the market, says he enrolled in the AAP when the party was launched. “But nothing happened. It takes effort, money and time to build a party, and even with the advantage of being from this state, they didn’t tap it. The candidate they have fielded from Kurukshetra, Sushil Gupta, is a stranger to us. He is from Delhi and is a Rajya Sabha MP. How will he be popular among people in Haryana? In Punjab, they had a face, of Bhagwant Mann, there is no one here.” Asked about Kejriwal’s arrest, the 52-year-old echoes the Delhi CM’s old guru Anna Hazare. “His India Against Corruption movement was against the rot of corruption in the system and he got arrested following graft allegations, that too against liquor policy, something he used to fight against. He should have gone for interrogation when he received the summons. Kumar Vishwas, Kiran Bedi, Anna Hazare, and others at the helm of the movement with Kejriwal are silent now, why?” Bansal, listening intently all this while, is not swayed and firmly believes in his nephew’s innocence. The last time he met Kejriwal was three months ago, he says. “I had gone to visit him and things seemed fine. Now, Sunita is speaking up about all of this. She is an educated yet humble woman … Modi is going after all the Opposition governments and this is just another ploy to defame everyone against him.” Though the AAP is still a marginal force in Haryana — in the 2019 Assembly elections, it contested 46 seats and polled fewer votes than the NOTA option — it claims to have expanded in recent months and has geared up to protest against Kejriwal’s arrest. “We have planned a massive protest at Ramleela Maidan with other INDIA bloc members and in Haryana, we conducted a candle march on Friday. We are planning an awareness campaign across the state to discuss the accusations levelled against Kejriwal ji and the funding the BJP has received from liquor companies,” says AAP state unit’s senior vice-president Anurag Dhanda. The party’s Bhiwani district youth president Manjeet Singhania claims that the anger over Kejriwal’s arrest is palpable in the region. “We have around 25 circles in the district unit, each comprising five villages, and workers have been going around planning candle marches in the wake of the arrest,” he says. State Congress leaders have also spoken out against the arrest. “This is a clear misuse of constitutional bodies against a sitting CM. It could be anyone next, it could be Akhilesh or Rahul Gandhi, like in the case of Hemant Soren. A glaring example of such misuse is Praful Patel’s case. We have to fight and protest peacefully against the NDA,” says Captain Ajay Singh Yadav, a former minister.
