Electoral defeats often lead to splintering of a party into various groups who blame each other for various debacles. But in AAP, we have a party which has registered an astounding victory, and is still battling with inner-party differences. Is it because the problems are too deep-seated for even a landslide win to wipe out? Prashant Bhushan in his letter, has made the following allegations:
1. Transparency and Accountability
- AAP has not put their accounts online, only put donations, not expenses. This is against the stand of transparency taken by AAP
- Neither Decisions nor Minutes of meetings of the National Executive (NE) nor of the PAC are available on the website
- Minutes of such meetings are not even maintained
- Although as per AAP’s constitution candidates are to be approved by PAC, in Delhi, not even bio-datas of the candidates were shared with PAC and such selection was done by the DECG (Delhi Elections Campaign Group)
- Even till November 2014, attempts were made by AAP to seek Congress support in Delhi, in violation of the decisions taken at the National Executive earlier
- Several decisions of the National Disciplinary Committee have not been implemented
- The NE and PAC do not meet regularly and members are not informed of the meetings if any
- The NE and PAC lack both regional and gender balance
2. Inner Party Democracy and Swaraj
- List of members/volunteers has not been prepared till date and hence no elections have ever taken place.
- Volunteer meetings in Delhi were a free for all where anybody could walk in
- When people raised objections to “importing of candidates from BJP and Congress”, they were “silenced brutally”
- Candidates were allowed to contest even after they were found illegally storing liquor and openly declaring on video that its OK to lure voters
- One candidate was made a fall guy for putting up communally sensitive posters
- Kejriwal over-ruled the NE’s decision to allow various State Units to contest state elections thus making a “mockery of the principles of democracy and Swaraj”
- One person centric campaign in Delhi is against the principles of Swaraj and leads to a “supremo controlled party”
3. Policies of the Party
- Reports of 30 Expert Committees and over a 100 experts, on policies of the party have been ignored for 2 years
- This results in Volunteers and Spokespersons often not knowing how to react to important issues
4. Funds of the Party
- There is no systematic planning of how huge donations received are to be spent
- Money is spent arbitrarily by unauthorized people due to the lack of empowered committee or decision-making system
- Some volunteers are paid but vast majority of them are unpaid
5. Unethical means and practices
- Karan Singh was expelled from the party on the basis of fraudulent SMSs under the name of AAVAAM and Singh’s pleas for investigation were ignored
- Eventually by Police Investigation it was known that Deepak Chowdhary (who had nothing to do with AVAM) had fraudulently sent the SMS, yet no action was taken against him
- A communal poster was put up by the party, and Amanatullah (now MLA) was forced to take the blame
