AAP and Kejriwal: Great Expectations or Irrational Expectations (Paperback - 2016)

It was a movement cutting across caste, class, religion, region, language, urban-rural divide that united both the aam-aadmi and the non-aam-aadmi against endemic corruption and for Jan Lokpal Bill, led by committed, selfless, sacrificing Team Anna, with the let’s-change-India, enthusiastic, patriotic young people and professionals as its engine, that ultimately morphed into the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) by the end of 2012.

Its meteoric rise within a year, and its unprecedented victory in 2015 Delhi elections are a proof aam-aadmi wants it to succeed, deliver and spread pan-India. AAP has all the things going for it, yet it is its own worst enemy. When people have shown their trust in it for its clean, honest and principled politics, why should it fritter away that trust through its mismanagement of internal dissentions and tamasha politics. No reasonable person is enamoured by the poverty-perpetuating and misery-multiplying povertarian, stale, socialistic claptrap that has been a global failure ; and therefore the exit of Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav and the like which they and the media tried to depict as principled was truly a case of good riddance.

This book covers the Team Anna agitation which was a prelude to the formation of the AAP, its various aspects without prejudice, its avoidable tamasha politics that mars and shows up as irrational the great expectations people have from it; and a brief profile of its various leaders. The book incorporates a chapter on the comparative study of Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi.

The book also focuses on what is most vital for the country: economic-model and important items on the national agenda, and what ought to be the AAP’s role. If the AAP aims to come up as a national alternative to the BJP, reducing the Dynasty to dust, it ought to shun trying to be the Congress—Corruption, or be more red than the communists or more pink than the socialists. True to its young blood, the AAP ought to espouse reasonable, developmental, growth-oriented economic policies.

Rajnikant Puranik has been a physicist, a banker and a software professional. He joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur for Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics, but left after completing the course work to join service. He had been a National Science Talent Scholar during college. He did his B.Sc. (Hons.) and M.Sc. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

A number of software products have been developed under Rajnikant’s leadership. He has till date authored two technical (software) books, The Art of Creative Destruction on Software Testing and Maximum Oracle, with Oracle Best Practices; one novel, The Malshej Moment; and two non-fiction works, Foundations of Misery, India 1947-64: Blunders of the Nehruvian Era and India After Nehru: From Lal Bahadur Shastri to Narendra Modi.

He blogs at rajnikantp.blogspot.in, his website is ww.rkpbooks.com, and his twitter account is twitter.com/Rajnikant_rkp.