Date:26/02/2015

Dear Colleagr-res,

we are meeting almost after 6 months, in the wake of this massive success in the DelhiAssembly elections' It is a time of celebration and credit for this remarkable perforrhance ofour party must go to the thousands of volunteers who worked day and night

- those who

came from all across the world to campaign in Delhi and those who worked fiom all over theworld on calling campaigns social media campaigns etc. But a greatpart of the credit must goto Arvind and his Delhi team which worked tirelessly and strategically to achieve this.

This historic victory was, in my view also the result of the dissatisfaction with the presentBJP government which is now increasingly being seen as anti people. But most inrportantly,it shows that people have reposed great faith in our party which is seen as a different kind ofpafty, very diffbrent from other poliiical parties, which is seen and believed to a verydifferent kind of politics based on principles of honesty, transparency, accountability, andparticipatory democracy' People who have reposed faith in our party have great expectationsfrom us and expect us to stay true to our professed ideals. If we fail or falter on this count, wecould fall as precipitously as we have risen.

So while we celebrate our victory, we must also recogn ize thatwe have faltered on severalcounts' The time has come therefore to take stock of the situation within the parry toexamine' take stock and truthfully introspect about the extent to which we have managed tostay true to our principles and ideals, where we have faltered and therefore what needs to bedone to correct things within and strengthen the systems of the party.

Transparency and accountability:

our party was founded on the principles of transparency and accountability which isembedded in the vision document of the party. we had craimed that parties shourd comeunder RTI and we berated the BJP and the congress for flouting the Information commissiondirective to them to come under RT[. we said that we would put out all our accounts on apublic website' But r'vhat is the realiiy today. Far from bringing the party under RTI, rve havenot even put our accounts on a website- we have put out our donations, but not expenses. wedo not even put ottt decisions of our constitutional bodies like the National Executive or thePAC on the *'ebsite, rvhat to say of the minutes. In fact as far as I am aware, even minutes or

,even decisions PAC or NE meetings are not maintained, what to say of making themtransparent. We have reached a situation, where for this election in Delhi, far from puttingout the list of shortlisted candidates on a public website for inviting information from thepublic and our volunteers, we were not even sharing the biodatas or even the names of thecandidates selected by the DECG with the PAC for fear that they might leak out, even thoughunder the Constitution, the candidates had to be approved by rhe PAC! The lack of recordingdecisions of the NE/PAC has led to situations where decisions taken by the NE (about notseeking Congress support for forming the government in Delhi after we resigned last year)were repeatedly flouted. Not only was a letter sent to the LG asking him to postpone thedissolution of the Assembly in June, but even as late as November, just before the actualdissolution of the Assembly, attempts were being sumeptitiously made to seek Congresssupport to form the government again in Delhi without having to contest elections.

Our systems of accountability including our disciplinary committees and State Lokpals havebecome largely dysfunctional in many places, leading to a situation where many of our mostdedicated volunteers are facing humiliation at the hands of people who call themselves officebearers and then misbehave with ow dedicated volunteers. I know that even several decisionsformally taken in the National disciplinary committee have not been implemented.

We don't even have regular meetings of the NE or the PAC as required by the Constitution.Also, in the infrequent meetings of the PAC, some of the PAC members are often not even"informed. In the absence of meetings of the NE, several decisions which need to be taken bythe NE are being taken by the PAC. It is essential that there are regular meetings of the NEand the.PAC and the decision making authority of the PAC needs to be more clearly defined.We also need to reconstitute the PAC to iave better regional and gender balance. The NEalso needs to be similarly expanded to have better gender and other balance, and to make itmore broad based.

We urgently need to set up a committee to report on the systems of transparency andaccountability which need to be rectified or set up to remedy the situation.

Inner party democracy and Swaraj:

Our party rvas born on the principle of inner party democracy and Srvaraj. Unfortunatelyhowever, till today, we have not been able to even put out our lists of members andvolunteers (active or otherwise), rvhat to say of seeking or going by the vieu,s of our

rnembers/volunteers- \\/e have not been able to hold any kind of election of any of our parlyttnits an1'wllere so fur, in the absence of any Iists of members or volunteers. This needs to beurgently rectified- The volunteer meetings to seek the views of volunteers about candidates inDelhi, r'vere largely, I am told, a free for all, with nobody knowing whether the persons r,vhoattended or voted in tl-re meeting were even from the State, or our volunteers, what to say ofwhether they were from the same constituency. This has made a mockery of our professedprir-rciples of Swaraj and has led to a lot of resentment and heartburning among our olddedicated volunteers- Many of them have complained to me that they were rudely andsometimes brutally silenced when they complained about the candidates being brought fromother parties just before the elections in preference to our old dedicated volunteers. They haveasked, "why has the party imported candidates from the BJP or Congress, who did not cometo the party when the party was formed, nor even before the 2013 Assembly elections, noreven beifore the Lok Sabha elections, and who also had unsavoury reputations?,, Our ownparty had complained against several of them that they distributed money and liquor or beatLrp our volunteers in the last elections, when they had contested on the tickets of other parties.One of them (the original Wazirpur candidate) went back to the BJp within a few hours ofour giving him a ticket- Another was implicated in illegally importing and storing Liquor inthe middle of the election. There y/as a video which surfaced about one of them where he isheard saying that it is oK to lure people to his Jan Sabha by offering them liquor. We did notcancel their tickets even after finding this out. one of them had been made the constituencyprabhari and promised a ticket immediately after he agreed to take the rap for our partyputting out a communal poster for which some of our volunteers were arrested. They are ourcurrent MLAs, and will be handling crores of MLA funds and will exercise several otherpowers such as giving PDS certificates etc. We will need to keep a tight check on them. whyshould we not proactively put out all the details of MLA funds on a public website in realtime.

swaraj means allowing decentralized decision making. on those principles, it is the StateUnits who have to decide whether they should contest elections in the state. yet we aredeciding for them and ordering them not to contest elections. Even when the NE had decidedto let the States decide whether to contest elections in their States, that decision wasfrLrstrated by Arvind deciding not to allow the states to contest elections. That Arvind'sdecision may have been right in retrospect does not detract from the fact that we made attlockery of the principles of denrocracy and Srvaraj. Even now. after the Delhi elections, inItis speech on the day of oath taking, Arvind announced that the party shoutd not contestelections in other States for the next 5 years. Though that may be his view, but such public

airing of views by the convenor of the party at such an important function would naturally be

ral

Karan Singh fronr the party. His pleas to investigate who sent the sMSs went unheeded bythe party' Eventually, the police investigation on his FIR revealed that the sMS was sent byour volunteer Deepak chowdhary who had nothing to do with AVAM. yet, even afterknowing this' no action was taken against him. People cannot be blamed for inferring in thesecircumstances that this has happened only because he must have acted on the orders of seniorfunctionaries of the party.

The same unethical practice was resorted to in the matter of the communal poster, publishedand put up by the party. Again when we were caught, we put up someone who agreed to be afall guy and he was rewarded by being made the constituency incharge and then given aticket by the party' such unethicaland indeed criminal practices must imme diatelycease andmechanisms be instituted to ensure that they do not recur.

ln conclusion, I would like to end by saying that our party has been built on the idealism andsweat and tears of thousands of dedicated volunteers who have sacrificed much to create adifferent kind or party' we owe it to them and to us to ensure that we do not drift and becomejust another' one man centric party, which is prepared to use any kind of means to attainpower' Let us put systems in place to ensure that that does not happen.

With warm regards,

.ffigW"