Flying With Kejriwal

Last week, a photo of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal occupying a business class seat in a Dubai-bound Emirates Airlines went viral. The frenzy on mainstream and social media left us with the impression that a national calamity had struck India.

The Bhartiya Janata Party was quick to launch a scathing attack on the Magsaysay Award winner, who the party thought had let India’s aam aadmi, or common man, down. Keeping the Delhi election in mind, Congress too jumped on the bandwagon.

The reason for their outrage stemmed from AAP critics’ perceived notion of a common man that Kejriwal claims to represent. This common man is a poverty-stricken individual who has no business boarding a flight, let alone travelling business class. As the day came to an end, self-appointed custodians of India’s collective conscience began to raise the pitch against Kejriwal for his “audacity” to travel to Dubai on a business class ticket.

So, was he guilty of using the Indian taxpayers’ money or abusing funds donated by AAP workers to enjoy this luxury? Or was it a result of a secret quid-pro-quo between AAP and the United Arab Emirates-based airlines? Of course not. The true reason behind Kejriwal’s trip to Dubai was to accept an award, whose organisers had chosen to provide him a business class ticket.

Interestingly, the outrage against Kejriwal came on a day militants were busy mounting brutal attacks on India’s soldiers within its territory in Kashmir and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was asking the opposition to drop their demand for the sacking of one of his cabinet ministers, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, for her alleged hate speech.

Yet, the usual suspects in the Indian TV news industry saw greater news value in questioning Kejriwal’s business class travel than putting Modi in the dock for what’s been a directionless foreign policy towards Pakistan (remember his or Sushma Swaraj’s promise during the Lok Sabha campaign that Pakistan will not dare kill a single soldier if Modi was elected PM?) or defending the sadhvi.

But this is not the first time Kejriwal’s has come under scrutiny for flying in so-called luxury. You may well remember his decision to accept India Today‘s offer to travel on a chartered flight from Jaipur to attend their annual conclave in March, 2014, and how the media had him hung, drawn and quartered on live TV back then.

I should know this because, in a way, I was responsible for contributing to the public scrutiny surrounding Kejriwal’s travel. It’s, therefore, imperative that I lift the lid on what has so far been a mystery.

I was in conversation with Kejriwal for several weeks persuading him to attend India Today’s prestigious annual conclave as keynote speaker. Given that it was an election year and he was required to travel extensively around the country, I knew it was going to be an uphill task convincing him to attend the event.

Also, Kejriwal’s deep-rooted belief that The India Today Group had done everything possible to hurt his party’s electoral chances during the Delhi elections made me even more sceptical about getting a positive response from him.

So, I was pleasantly surprised when he phoned me one night to confirm his participation. “I’m doing it because of you. Warna India Today ney mujhe aur meri party ko khatam karne mein koi kasar nahi chori hai [otherwise India Today has left no stone unturned in destroying me and my party],” he said.

His only condition, however, was that he should not be interviewed by a certain editor-at-large anchor, who according to him, was notorious for running a nasty propaganda against him and his party in the past, ostensibly “to please his masters in the BJP”.

Curiously though, weeks later, while in conversation with Rahul Gandhi’s team to facilitate his first TV interview in Hindi for Aaj Tak, a senior Congress leader repeated exactly these lines about the anchor in question. “We can consider your request for Hindi RG’s interview on Aaj Tak as long as XX doesn’t interview him,” he said.

But that’s a story for another occasion.

Truth be told, both my bosses, Aroon Purie and Kalli Purie, were ecstatic to know that Kejriwal had actually said yes to the conclave. So, we began to send the invitation out. The AAP leader was on his two-day roadshow in Kanpur but we were in constant touch. Given the history of his relationship with India Today and his perception about the group, I wanted to ensure that he didn’t renege on his commitment.

On the last day of his Kanpur roadshow, Kejriwal informed me that his party had now decided to do a five-day roadshow in Gujarat, where he would attempt to expose Modi’s claims of Gujarat’s development. Dates for this recently-decided roadshow, were now clashing with the conclave dates.

Mincing no words, he told me about his intention to withdraw from the conclave, adding that he had also expressed his regret to Rajasthan Patrika, which was holding a similar event in Jaipur on the same day as India Today – March 8.

My heart sank as the invitation was now out, with us highlighting Kejriwal’s session very prominently. The AAP leader’s last-minute decision to drop out as keynote speaker would have caused a huge embarrassment to the group. Kalli asked me to persuade him to change his mind “at any cost”.

We met at his Tuglak Lane residence. With a little bit of explaining and persuasion, I managed to convince Kejriwal to change his mind. Or let’s say, he understood India Today‘s and my predicament, and agreed to consider options that would allow him to fly to Delhi in the evening to honour his conclave commitments before returning to Ahmedabad on the first available flight next morning. He, however, had only one reservation.

“It will be morally wrong for me to take the time out for India Today Conclave but ignore Rajasthan Patrika‘s event. If I attend yours I will have to attend theirs too.”

I was fine with that.

So we worked out a plan whereby Kejriwal would fly from Ahmedabad to Jaipur in the afternoon for the Patrika‘s event before leaving for Delhi in the evening. While Patrika would take care of his Ahmedabad-Jaipur travel, India Today was expected to make arrangements for his Jaipur-Delhi and Delhi-Ahmedabad travels.

There was only one problem though.

There was no early evening flight available from Jaipur for Kejriwal to be able to reach in time for his session at 7:30 pm. Since we were also keen for him to arrive with plenty of time in hand so that he could be among us in the audience for the session with Amitabh Bachchan — a creative brain suggested that Kejriwal, as the modern day’s angry man, posing for a photo with Bachchan, Bollywood’s original angry man, would result in a unique photo opportunity.

When informed about the unfavourable flight schedule, Kejriwal suggested that we dropped the plan as it would really help him focus on his Gujarat roadshow, which was beginning to generate plenty of excitement in the media.

Secretly, we also knew what Kejriwal’s session was capable of doing to our conclave. Not to forget the significant impact of original content from his interview on TVs’ overall TRPs and web traffic. To put it more bluntly, while Kejriwal wanted any excuse to bow out of the conclave, we wanted him at any cost.

So, India Today decided to hire a chartered flight, albeit the cheapest one available. According to the plan, I would travel to Jaipur in that chartered plane and accompany Kejriwal to the capital.

I was a bit wary of travelling to Jaipur, but had to go in the larger interest of the organisation.

We kept this a close secret with only the top management being privy to our plan. But little did we know that one of Kejriwal’s “well-wishers” within the organisation had tipped off the news agency, ANI, about our intention to transport him on a chartered flight.

As somebody who’s flown extensively in the past, I was very disappointed with the experience of flying in a chartered plane.  With no toilet, broken table, no flight attendant and half of the four-seater plane being converted into an in-flight warehouse, it was anything but a luxury.

As the conclave dates drew nearer, it became abundantly clear that Kejriwal’s appearance in the conclave would be nothing less than a coup in the context of journalism. On the very first day of his roadshow in Kutch, his convoy was attacked with police detaining him briefly. TV channels ran those dramatic visuals, while police struggled to come up with a coherent response in justification to AAP leader’s detention.

To cut the long story short, after we arrived in Delhi, I got a call from one of my reporters about the frenzied media coverage on Kejriwal’s chartered flight journey.

“They all are running the visuals of your chartered plane while being taxied at Jaipur airport,” I was told. The reporter suggested that we made our way out through the VIP gate to avoid further attention of reporters in-attendance at the airport.

Kejriwal turned down my suggestion and insisted on leaving through the normal gate.

Outside the airport, we were greeted by the ANI cameraman. Since all ANI cameras are armed with a TVU pack, I was convinced that the visuals of us coming out of the airport was being broadcast live across all news channels interested in this story.

While Kejriwal was visibly nervous on this development, the conclave’s organisers couldn’t believe their luck at this free publicity for their event on rival channels. Kejriwal asked me to urgently release a statement clarifying his position. Kalli quickly issued a statement maintaining that the facility extended to the AAP leader was not extraordinary and the group would do the same for all important guests.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve provided a chartered flight to our guest to attend the conclave and certainly won’t be the last,” the official statement read.

From India Today‘s point of view, paying just a few lakh rupees to secure Kejriwal as keynote speaker at a time when there was an immense media interest in him was nothing less than a bargain. Contrary to the millions of rupees that we were paying to other guests as appearance fees, inviting Kejriwal had incurred no such costs. As expected Kejriwal’s session broke all previous outreach records.

Aaj Tak‘s viewership during Kejriwal’s session at the conclave was more than the combined viewership of India’s 13 Hindi news channels. The channel attracted 2.7 times more viewers during his session than the combined audience of all India’s English news channels for that hour.

On twitter, the tweets related to him had generated more than 300 million impressions — the highest in the history of conclave.

However, the treatment meted out to him during the session was in bad taste with a couple of individuals resorting to cheap personal attacks against him. One of them was Delhi’s former police commissioner, Niraj Kumar, who took sadistic pleasure in ridiculing Kejriwal’s chronic cough and his love for the muffler.

While Keriwal was leaving, I apologised for this unsavoury treatment. He replied with a smile, “Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. I was prepared for this. Hope I’ve made India Today happy.”