The Department That Wasn’t There

The Aam Aadmi Party’s chaotic governance anarchic governance reaches new heights as it fumbles in Punjab after losing Delhi.

Punjab

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), once hailed as the disruptor of Indian politics, seems to have taken disruption a bit too literally. In Punjab, where it rules with a majority, the party recently discovered (after nearly 20 months) that one of its ministers had been in charge of a department that did not exist. This Kafkaesque blunder, which would be amusing if it weren’t so emblematic of the party’s broader chaos, comes just weeks after AAP suffered a humiliating defeat in the Delhi Assembly elections. If Delhi was a rejection, Punjab is quickly unraveling into an indictment.

The revelation, buried in a dry government notification, is staggering. Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal, an AAP minister was officially assigned the Department of Administrative Reforms. Except, as it turns out, no such department actually existed. For almost two years, Dhaliwal presumably attended meetings, took briefings, and perhaps even formulated policy for an entity that was little more than a figment of bureaucratic imagination. The Bhagwant Mann-led government, far from offering an immediate mea culpa, merely “corrected” the records, informing the public that Dhaliwal would now only retain the NRI Affairs portfolio.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wasted no time in pouncing on the absurdity, with its spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari dubbing AAP’s governance in Punjab “a joke.” Amit Malviya, the BJP’s combative IT cell head, was even blunter, declaring that Arvind Kejriwal was “a charlatan” who ought to be banished from public life.

When confronted, Mann claimed that the department had, in fact, existed in some amorphous form and that the government had now “changed its name” and “made it a department.” If Mann’s explanation was meant to reassure, it instead underscored a deeper problem that the AAP’s governance is not merely inefficient, it is anarchic.

It would be one thing if this were an isolated incident, but the debacle is symptomatic of AAP’s larger trajectory. The party’s claim to fame was built on the promise of clean governance, surgical efficiency, and an unsparing assault on political corruption. Yet, in Punjab, the AAP government appears rudderless, riddled with dysfunction and increasingly out of its depth. Even its much-vaunted education reforms, one of Kejriwal’s signature achievements in Delhi, have failed to take off in Punjab.

The party’s spectacular defeat in the Delhi Assembly elections earlier this month has already plunged it into an existential crisis. Kejriwal, who once styled himself as an incorruptible alternative to India’s political old guard, has been fighting off corruption allegations himself. The very idea of AAP as an insurgent, anti-establishment force has begun to ring hollow.

Unlike in Delhi, where AAP could fall back on the relative competence of its governance record, in Punjab, the party has no such cushion. The latest fiasco, absurd as it is, captures AAP’s predicament: a party that once thrived on attacking the establishment has now become an unwieldy, chaotic version of the very system it set out to reform.

AAP has often drawn comparisons to India’s other regional parties in its ambition and being unencumbered by traditional hierarchies. But unlike the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra or the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, the AAP lacks institutional depth. Its entire machinery revolves around a single figure - Arvind Kejriwal. Without his unrelenting media blitzes and rhetorical barrages, the party struggles to function.

Punjab was supposed to be AAP’s great experiment, a state where it could prove that its governance model worked outside Delhi. Instead, the experiment is unraveling in real-time. The discovery of a non-existent department is a metaphor for AAP’s governance - improvised, shambolic and, increasingly, unserious.

If the party is to survive beyond Kejriwal’s personality cult, it will need to prove that it can govern competently. Because right now, the AAP isn’t just losing elections. It is losing credibility.