23 Signs You're about to be Fired

Aine Caine in The Independent


Getting fired can be a real shock to the system.

But there are usually signs that your termination is pending. You've just got to know where to look.

Maybe your boss is out to get you. Maybe you've been embroiled in some recent controversy at work. Or maybe your organization is undergoing a massive transition or merger.

Either way, it helps to be prepared.

Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job," tells Business Insider that the savviest professionals always keep an eye out for the classic signs that their job is in danger. This way, if and when they notice red flags popping up, they can attempt to turn the tides before it's too late.

Here are 23 signs you may be getting the boot:

You receive a bad performance review (or two, or three)

A negative evaluation is not always synonymous with being fired, but, in conjunction with other bad feedback, it can mean trouble, says Taylor. "Your employer needs to create a paper trail, so along with warnings, your employer will use a performance review to document the problem areas."

More than one poor performance review in a row is an especially bad sign, adds Michael Kerr, an international business speaker and author of "The Humor Advantage."

"Depending on how bad your first performance review was, you may be given a chance to make corrections and improve, but a series of critical performance reviews could be a major sign that your job is in jeopardy," Kerr tells Business Insider.

If it's because of a lack of experience or lack of training in a certain area, then there's always a chance to fix it. But critical phrases to be mindful of during performance reviews include, "You're not a good fit for our culture," "You're not a team player," "Your personality or style doesn't seem to mesh with the team," or "You have a major attitude problem."

"If you hear any of these types of criticisms then it's time to break out your résumé, since it's often assumed that attitudinal issues are deeply engrained and unfixable," he says.

You're left out of the loop

If it's suddenly hard to access important data that would help you perform well in your job, or you're not invited to important meetings or included on key emails, a pink slip may be coming your way, says Taylor.

"There could be other reasons for this happening, but certainly one may be that your leadership has lost the trust or confidence in your abilities, making you vulnerable when and if layoffs happen," Kerr says. 

Your job has become mission impossible

"When you first assumed the role, you had your marching orders and could accomplish them. Now it seems that you're tasked with projects akin to climbing Mount Everest blindfolded," says Taylor.

"You're being set up to fail," Kerr explains. "Sometimes this is due to lousy leadership, but occasionally it can be because a company wants to get rid of you, but they need solid evidence to do so, and setting you up for disaster is one way of getting the 'proof' you longer belong there."
Your boss has 'warned' you (more than once)

Formal warnings are never a good thing. "You may have received a verbal warning, a written warning, and maybe even a second written warning," says Taylor. If you have, know that more bad news may be coming your way.

Your relationship with your boss has deteriorated

You used to be friends (or friendly, at least) -- but now there's tension whenever you're in the same room. "Once your relationship has deteriorated to the point of being toxic, then how your boss treats you -- from ignoring you to publicly berating you -- can be obvious signs that your job might be in peril," says Kerr.

You're asked to provide detailed reports about time or expenses

"Increased scrutiny is a phenomenon that is rarely initiated by the accounting department," Robert Dilenschneider, author of "50 Plus!: Critical Career Decisions for the Rest of Your Life," tells Business Insider. "The boss believes that you have wasted time or inflated expenses. Even if you are 100% innocent, it doesn't matter. Find out if you are the only person being scrutinized."
Fewer projects are coming your way

Here's a bad sign: You suddenly have a lot of time on your hands because not a lot of work is being assigned to you. "As you try to secure normal work, it seems it's hard to get cooperation from your boss and other managers," Taylor says. "They're suddenly making your work life difficult."
Teamwork isn't your strong suit

It's important to fit into the company's culture. That means taking one for the team sometimes, as HR consultant Laurie Ruettimann tells Reader's Digest: "If we ask you to travel for your job or attend a conference, it's not really a question. Say no, and it can be career-ending."

You've lost resources

When you lose staff, budgets, and access to certain outside services and/or office space -- or any number of tools that would enhance your performance -- it could be because your employer is trying to push you out. 

Your boss is on your case all the time

Are you constantly being asked for progress reports? Do you find that your boss constantly monitors your work?

If so, you may want to start looking for a new job, says Dilenschneider.

You're being micromanaged or ignored

It seems that you're working in extremes. Either your boss is watching your every step, or they're nowhere to be found. "Either way, it makes for a highly uncomfortable environment," Taylor explains. "If they're watching over you, you feel a lack of trust. If they're ignoring you, then you are in a seemingly endless state of inertia on your project status."

You have fewer responsibilities

Do you feel less important? Have your subordinates been transferred to other managers? Have projects been reassigned to your colleagues? If so, you could be getting the boot sometime soon.
Your perks start to evaporate

"Your colleagues are all sent to a conference in Marrakesh, but you aren't invited. You are told to fly coach after years of flying business class. Suddenly, you lose your corner office and are relocated to the bullpen," says Dilenschneider. "Perks are an important part of the job, and if you sense yours are being eroded, you have every right to worry."
You're no longer praised for your work

Even if you performed a miracle never before witnessed by a mortal being, it seems your boss wouldn't acknowledge it now. "To do so would run contrary to the campaign underway to remove you from the company," explains Taylor.

You've received a pay cut or been asked to take time off

If you've been asked to take a leave of absence, you probably have something to worry about. "This is a major sign that things aren't well, even if it's under the guise of being what's 'best for you,'" says Kerr. "It's the equivalent of a dating couple 'taking a break for a while' -- and we all know how that usually ends."

You notice more gossip and strange behavior from your coworkers

When people seem to shy away from you, and you notice it most from people with whom you shared a friendship, it probably means something's up. "Oftentimes when coworkers hear rumors about someone being fired or even reprimanded, they stay away to avoid 'guilt by association,'" Taylor says.

You report to new or more people

Suddenly you're reporting to more junior people or more managers in a matrix environment. "There's more red tape and bureaucracy whereas before you could get your work done in a streamlined way," Taylor says. This isn't a great sign.

You've made a major mistake that causes your company external embarrassment or a lot of money

"Depending on the context and how your leadership team treats failures and setbacks, especially in the realm of experimenting with innovative ideas, then you might be allowed to file a major mistake under the heading 'learning experience,'" Kerr says. "But for some, this will mean an early exit out the door."

Your boss goes directly to your subordinates

This sign is similar to "being left out of the loop" -- but even worse. "Most organizations have a chain of command, and when it is disrupted, it is a clear indication that you are no longer needed," says Dilenschneider.

Your access to certain data is limited

When a company is preparing to let someone go, they sometimes limit or revoke the employee's access to certain accounts a bit prematurely.

Beware if your email password no longer works or you've been locked out of your company's intranet, says Taylor.

You're no longer asked for input on key decisions

Not being asked for input means your boss no longer values or cares about what you have to say, Kerr warns. "Freezing you out of the loop is often the first sign of a slow slide out the door."
There was a recent merger, but little information

After a merger, it's not uncommon for a company to make layoffs -- sometimes even massive layoffs, Kerr says.

"If you're feeling that your job was at risk already, then a merger could put the nail on the proverbial coffin," adds Taylor.

Your instincts are telling you something's wrong

"If you feel you've done everything you can, but still have that 'I might get fired' feeling, you're probably right, and it's likely time to move on," Andy Bailey of business coaching service Petra Coach tells Business Insider. "You may be an 'A' player, but it might have to be somewhere else. Begin seeking out other positions that better reflect your personality and work ethic."

Ketti Salemme of TINYPulse, an employee survey product, also tells Business Insider that it's important not to disregard your own instincts.

"Sometimes the sign can be nothing more than a gut feeling," Salemme says. "Whether it be a shift in the company culture, your job duties, or your relationship with colleagues, this can be indicative enough that you may soon be let go."

Wolfgang Streeck: the German economist calling time on capitalism

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Outside was panic. Barely a couple of hours after Donald Trump had been declared the next president of the United States and even the political columnists, those sleek interlocutors of power, were in shock. At the National Gallery in London, however, one of the few thinkers to have anticipated Trump’s rise was ready to see some paintings. Over from Germany for a few days of lectures, Wolfgang Streeck had an afternoon spare – and we both wanted to see the Beyond Caravaggio exhibition.

Nothing in his work prepares you for meeting Streeck (pronounced Stray-k). Professionally, he is the political economist barking last orders for our way of life, and warning of the “dark ages” ahead. His books bear bluntly fin-de-siecle titles: two years ago was Buying Time, while the latest is called How Will Capitalism End?(spoiler: not well). Even his admirers talk of his “despair”, by which they mean sentences such as this: “Before capitalism will go to hell, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”

What does such gloom look like in the flesh? Small glasses, neat side parting and moustache, a backpack, a smart anorak and at least a decade younger than his 70 years. Alluding to Trump’s victory, he cheerily declares “What a morning!” as if discussing the likelihood of rain, then strolls into the gallery.

Decadence… Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Photograph: The National Gallery London

You don’t merely look at a Caravaggio; you square up to one. The scenes are tightly cropped, with characters that jostle and stare at the viewer. Their mordancy is a tonic to Streeck, who laughs with delight. He pauses in front of Boy Bitten by a Lizard and admires how the lizard clings on with its teeth to the boy’s finger. At a scene of cardsharps he exclaims, “Feel the decadence! The threat of violence!”

He notes how many paintings date from just before the thirty years’ war: “They’re full of the anticipation that the world is about to fall apart.”

Then comes The Taking of Christ, a dark, dense painting that shows Jesus just after his betrayal by Judas. Gripped by his treacherous former disciple, Christ looks down, ready to be bundled off by the armoured Roman centurions. “Caravaggio is always there just before the explosion,” Streeck observes. “This morning might have been a Caravaggio moment: just before the election of Trump.”

Like Caravaggio before the explosion, Streeck has been hanging around this crash scene for years – long before the plane came hurtling down and the centrist politicians and pundits began rushing around.

At a time when macroeconomists have failed and other academics have retreated into disciplinary solipsism, Streeck is one of the few (other exceptions include Mark Blyth, Colin Crouch and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) to have risen to the moment. Many of the themes that will define this year, this decade, are in his work. The breakup of Europe, the rise of plutocrat-populists such as Trump, the failures of Mark Carney and the technocratic elite: he has anatomised all of them.


Why should oligarchs be interested in their countries’ democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it?

This summer, Britons mutinied against their government, their experts and the EU – and consigned themselves to a poorer, angrier future. Such frenzies of collective self-harm were explained by Streeck in the 2012 lectures later collected in Buying Time:

Professionalised political science tends to underestimate the impact of moral outrage. With its penchant for studied indifference … [it] has nothing but elitist contempt for what it calls “populism”, sharing this with the power elites to which it would like to be close … [But] citizens too can “panic” and react “irrationally”, just like financial investors … even though they have no banknotes as arguments but only words and (who knows?) paving stones.

Here he is in 2013, foreshadowing the world of LuxLeaks, SwissLeaks and the Panama Papers and their revelations of a one-sided class war – by the 1% against the rest of us:


Why should the new oligarchs be interested in their countries’ future productive capacities and present democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it, processing back and forth the synthetic money produced for them at no cost by a central bank for which the sky is the limit, at each stage diverting from it hefty fees and unprecedented salaries, bonuses, and profits as long as it is forthcoming – and then leave their country to its remaining devices and withdraw to some privately owned island?

And in a 2015 essay, he warns that resentment against such elites will not be wholesomely Fabian but will instead take the form either of “public entertainment” or “some politically regressive sort of nationalism”. It will look less like Hillary than Donald:

Politicization is migrating to the right side of the political spectrum where anti-establishment parties are getting better and better at organising discontented citizens dependent upon public services and insisting on political protection from international markets.

In such long, precise, comfortless sentences, Streeck sets out the crises facing Britain, the US and the continent. His diagnosis is both political and economic, and it makes him what Chris Bickerton, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge, thinks might be “the most interesting person around today on the subject of the relationship between democracy and capitalism”.

 Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York’s Times Square, 2008. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Which makes him the most interesting person on the most urgent subject of our times. Eight years after Lehman Brothers keeled over and nearly took the entire banking system down with it, capitalism remains broken. British workers are suffering their most severe pay squeeze in at least seven decades. And even though politicians and the policymakers have pulled on every lever – cuts, investment, housing boom, hundreds of billions pumped into the markets – still the engine refuses to purr. The failure is international: the Bank of International Settlements, the central banks’ central bank, warned a few months ago that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth”.

Not for the first time, the sandwich board-wearers are declaring the end of capitalism – but today Streeck believes they are right. In its deepest crises, he says, modern capitalism has relied on its enemies to wade in with the lifebelt of reform. During the Great Depression of the 30s, it was FDR’s Democrats who rolled out the New Deal, while Britain’s trade unionists allied with Keynes.
Compare that with now. Over 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has destroyed its opposition. When Margaret Thatcher was asked to give her greatest achievement, she nominated “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.” The prime minister who declared “There is no alternative”, then did her damnedest to extirpate any such alternative. The result? The unions are withered, the independent tenants’ associations have disappeared along with the stock of council housing, the BBC is forever on the back foot, and local, regional and national newspapers are now the regular subjects of obituaries. A similar story can be told across the rich world.

Public discontent is fitful and fragmented, ready to fall into Trump’s tiny hands. Meanwhile, capitalism – unrestrained and unreformed – will die.

This isn’t the violent overthrow envisaged by Marx and Engels. In The Communist Manifesto, they argued that capitalism’s “gravediggers” would be the proletariat. Nearly 170 years later, Streeck is predicting that the capitalists will be their own gravediggers, through having destroyed the workers and the dissidents they needed to maintain the system. What comes next is not some better replacement but is more akin to the centuries-long rotting away of the Roman empire.

And, yes, his latest book is out just in time for Christmas. Not so long ago, such catastrophism would have been the stuff of Speakers’ Corner. Today, it goes right to the brokenness of politics.

Streeck is admired by the team around Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, and was invited to this year’s Labour conference in Liverpool (work commitments forced him to decline). One senior adviser described his relevance to British politics thus: “He is pretty blunt about how serious the situation is, for social democracy and capitalism.”


That we could modify capitalism towards equality and tame the beast – now those are utopian ideals
What gives Streeck’s analysis extra force is that he comes from the very establishment he now attacks. He has played many key roles: joint head of Germany’s top social science institute, an adviser in the late 90s to Gerhard Schröder’s government, one of Europe’s most eminent theorists of capitalism. While never a Third Way-er, he was friendly with David and Ed Miliband.

“I spent a long time in my life exploring the possibilities for an intelligent social democratic solution of the class conflict,” he explains over lunch. “The idea that we could modify capitalism towards equality and social justice. That we could tame the beast. Now I think those are more or less utopian ideals.”

He is thus a case study in the very thing he writes about: the demoralisation of centrist politics – and its radicalisation.

The great disillusionment came upon returning to Germany in 1995, after years teaching industrial relations in the US. It was the era of Germany being labelled “the sick man of Europe”, when one in five east German workers were unemployed. Through the metalworkers’ trade union, Streeck was invited to join a committee of trade unions, employers and government. Called the Alliance for Jobs (Bündnis für Arbeit), its task was to reform labour laws. Streeck believed this was “the last call for trade unions and social democracy”: the final chance to get more people into work without stripping workers of their rights.

“We came up with a good model, but everything we proposed was blocked – not just by the employers but by the unions, too.”

The Alliance fell apart and within a couple of years, Schröder had brought in the Hartz reforms – policies drawn up by a former Volkswagen executive that set up a new regime of workfare and benefit sanctions, and kicked the bottom out of the labour market.

A member of the Social Democratic Party, Germany’s counterpart to Labour, since the age of 16, Streeck finally cancelled his subs a few years ago. Would he still place himself as a social democrat? He quotes Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” In another interview he has described “the most urgent task for the left” as “sobering up”.

The constant sobriety might prove wearing, were it not for his easy companionship. Listening back to the recording, the primary sound is Streeck’s laughter – that and “Jajaja!”, a Bren gun enthusiasm for any new idea or argument.

He also gives good gossip. A “power breakfast” with financial policymakers and investment bankers is dismissed as “clueless and so stereoptypical. They complained about the stupidity of the masses who didn’t understand the expertise that someone like Alan Greenspan was able to bring to central banking.” This is the same Greenspan who, as head of the US central bank in the bubble years, believed financiers could regulate themselves.

On this trip he went to a conference on Brexit. “I was shocked by the unanimous sense of guilt.” One former British ambassador “began by saying we have to apologise to our foreign friends for the vote to leave Europe. I said, ‘You ought to be happy to have sent a warning to the European Union.’”

He sees the support for Brexit and Trump as stemming from the same source. “You have a growing group of all people, who, under the impact of neoliberal internationalisation, have become increasingly excluded from the mainstream of their society.

Visions of London wealth … Canary wharf financial district. Photograph: DBURKE / Alamy/Alamy

“You look out here,” He gestures out of the windows of the National Gallery, at the domes and columns of Trafalgar Square, “And it’s a second Rome. You walk through the streets at night and you say, ‘My God, yes: this is what an empire looks like’.” This is the land of what Streeck calls the Marktsvolk – literally, the people of the market, the club-class financiers and executives, the asset-owning winners of globalisation.

But this space – geographic, economic, political – is off-limits to the Staatsvolk: the ones who fly yearly on holiday rather than weekly on business, the downsized, the indebted losers of neoliberalism. “These people are being driven out of London. In French cities it’s the same thing. This both reinforces them as a political power structure, and puts them completely on the defensive. But one thing they do know is that conventional politics has totally written them off.” Social democrats such as the outgoing Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi are guilty, too. “They’re on the side of the winners.”

International flows of people, money and goods: Streeck accepts the need for all these – “but in some sort of directed, governable way. It has to be, otherwise societies dissolve”.

Those views on immigration landed him in another fight this summer, when he wrote an essay attacking Angela Merkel for her open-door policy towards refugees from Syria and elsewhere. It was a “ploy”, he said, to import tens of thousands of cheap workers and thus allow German employers to bring down wages. Colleagues accused him of spinning a “neoliberal conspiracy” theory and of giving cover to Germany’s far right. Streeck’s defence is simple: “It is impossible to protect wages against an unlimited labour supply. Does saying that make me some proto-fascist?”

What gives this back-and-forth a twist is the little-known fact that Streeck is himself the child of refugees. Both 25 years old when the second world war ended, his parents were among the 12 million displaced people to arrive from eastern Europe in West Germany. Streeck was born just outside Münster in a room requisitioned by the state from a shoemaker. His parents were poor. “I remember they stole vegetables from the fields and coal from passing trains.”

His mother was a Sudeten German in Czechoslovakia, who was given 24 hours’ notice to leave when the war ended, taking only what she could carry. After Streeck left home she began to study the Czech language. “It was a sense of ‘If I can’t go back there I at least want to speak the language of those people who now live where I used to’.”

Her son went to a grammar school founded by Martin Luther, where he was taught Greek and Latin and expected to become a theologian. Instead, he fell in with the then-illegal Communist party. Aged 16, he was in charge of organising the reading circle – “suppressed literature such as the Communist Manifesto and Rosa Luxemburg” – and held it at the local employers’ association “because no one would ever suspect”.

In 1968, he was a student radical at Frankfurt, “but I never had any truck with the ‘marijuana left’. I felt closer to the working class than to the pot-smoking classes”.

Now he lives with his wife in part of a farmyard of a castle in Brühl, a small town just outside Cologne. The retiree is still up by six every morning and at his desk for 8.30. “I have learned to write only till 1pm. After that I give myself over to academic intrigues.” And to novels: when we meet, he is reading I Hate the Internet, by Jarett Kobek, a Silicon Valley engineer who claims that the internet has “fucked up” his life.

After lunch, we cross the Thames to King’s College where Streeck is to deliver a lecture. There is more gossip, this time about Greek politics and the hollowing out of the Syriza government. As teenagers, Streeck’s class travelled to Greece to look at antiquities. Instead, he began reading local newspapers on the king’s attempts to chuck out prime minister Georgios Papandreou. “I wrote a report in the school newspaper that was almost entirely concerned with the emerging military dictatorship.” Sixty years later, he is working on a book about democracy in southern Europe.

The lecture room is packed, students spread across the floor and peering around the wall at Streeck, absent-mindedly playing with a paperclip and quoting Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. [pause] In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms can appear.” In the lecture’s interval, a variety of students buy his books and hover about for him to sign them. At the end, a student asks: “what should the left do?”

Occupy protest in Frankfurt, 2011. Photograph: Arne Dedert/EPA

It is the same question I’d put a few hours earlier. Both times, Streeck warns he is about to disappoint us. To me he cites an Occupy protest in Frankfurt. Days before that, he says, thousands of police were deployed to Germany’s capital of finance. “The authorities were scared shitless. I think more such scariness must happen. They must learn that in order to keep people quiet they need extraordinary effort.”

No mention of ballot boxes; nor of any need for a bigger vision “because the others don’t have a blueprint”.

But, I say, Nigel Farage and the rest are at least pretending to have an answer.

“And we should criticise them.” The press always talks of a lack of business confidence, he says; now is the time for the voters to demonstrate a lack of public confidence.

The analogy doesn’t work and, listening back to the tape, I can hear agitation in my voice. A businessperson can go on an investment strike; he or she can hoard cash. Even if voters sat out an election, they would still face the consequences. Muslim mums would get their headscarves ripped off, a Polish man could get stabbed to death for going in the wrong kebab shop.

In a phone call a couple of weeks later, I press Streeck again. “If I look 10 or 20 years out, I don’t like what I see,” he says. Nor is he alone: he quotes a new book by the former head of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and his projection of “great uncertainty” ahead.

But doesn’t he want something better than a new dark ages for his grandchildren? “If I am honest, now I am thankful for every passing year that is good and peaceful. And I hope for another one. Very short-term, I know, but those are my horizons.”

Giving the AAP a fair chance

By Gargi Parsai in The Hindu

If the AAP experiment fails then the people will be back to being reduced to fixed deposits in ‘vote banks’ of established parties

It is a convention in Parliament that when a new member makes a debut speech, fellow members greet him or her with a thumping of desks. Normally the person is heard out without interruptions even if it is a hotly debated issue. The Chair is also indulgent even if the member exceeds the time limit. It’s the same for first-time ministers. They are not pounced upon for fumbling or giving inadequate replies. This camaraderie is also visible when contentious Bills are taken up and which the Opposition helps the government pass, sometimes without discussion.

But the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is learning along the way after forming a minority government in Delhi, is not being given the same chance that the political class would give to “one of its own.” Even those who were indulgent of JP taking the support of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to defeat a “corrupt and autocratic” Indira Gandhi and of V.P. Singh who sought the help of all including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the wake of the Bofors scandal, are not willing to give space to the new “alternative politics” that the AAP stands for.

Capturing voter imagination

It is grossly unfair that while every government gets five years to implement its manifesto, the AAP government is expected to fulfil its within the first month. Even so, the party has taken crucial decisions on water and power tariffs to give relief to law-abiding citizens; 700 litres of free water per day is being given as a “right” and is on metered usage to encourage people to get meters. Those who exceed the limit (of water conservation) will have to pay for the entire use. Likewise, the decision to reduce the power tariff by half — up to 400 units of usage per month — only restores the balance. Citizens’ cries over abnormally inflated electricity bills generated by private service providers went unheard by Sheila Dikshit’s government. For a housewife, the average saving of Rs.8,000 to Rs.10,000 per month alone on these counts helps take some of the sting out of galloping inflation.

Nursery admission guidelines for private schools as well as the CAG audit of power companies have been upheld by the Delhi High Court indicating that the AAP government’s decisions are solid enough to stand judicial scrutiny. Grievance redress helplines are working, genuine and effective.

The AAP has compelled the so-called mainstream parties to take note of its novel ideas. They are aping it not because they believe in its ideas but because they feel the AAP has caught the imagination of voters with its approach to tackling the menace of corruption and to participatory democracy. That is why the Congress has suddenly gone silent on its “game changer” Food Security Act, and thrust the anti-corruption placard into the hands of Rahul Gandhi. After admitting that the 128 year-old party had much to learn from just-born AAP, Mr. Gandhi recently announced that the party will invite in 15 Lok Sabha constituencies applications from common people to contest on a party ticket — a methodology initiated by the AAP.

The BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi too is now harping on ridding India of corruption.

There can be no two opinions about the overzealous manner in which Delhi’s Law Minister Somnath Bharti took up the case of flesh trade and drug trafficking in his constituency. Even if one overlooks the manner in which policemen on the spot showed hostility to the Minister, Mr. Bharti could have done it differently and at a decent hour without hurting the dignity of the women under suspicion. Neither can one absolve “poet” Kumar Vishwas of his sexist comments. Both need to be reined in. But for agitated women groups to say that it is because of these two men that the entire party needs to be condemned is playing into the hands of those threatened by the AAP’s growing appeal ahead of the general election.

When Mr. Arvind Kejriwal worked on his goal to empower the aam aadmi he perhaps did not contend with the potpourri that would form the fundamentals of his party. So, if you have a Kumar Vishwas and a Somnath Bharti, there are others like a Yogendra Yadav who has been apologetic upfront about inherent contradictions in his political entity. When asked in an interview about people with divergent views such as social activist Medha Patkar and Captain Gopinath of Air Deccan backing the party, Mr. Kejriwal’s answer was simple — “This is the diversity of our country.” In that sense, the party’s initiative towards participatory democracy on the basis of continuous dialogue with common citizens is refreshing.

Open-door politics

With its origins in Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement, the AAP does not shy away from projecting itself as a party in movement mode. Indeed, it is different as a party — not distant, not structured and certainly not white-collared. Those who see politics largely through the prism of a “status quo mindset” and are more comfortable in a “high command” or single leader party structure will perhaps find it difficult to accept the AAP’s open-door politics in which every person counts irrespective of caste, religion, and standing.

In effect, the AAP was truly inclusive when it selected ordinary people, those with no political clout or background, to become MLAs and ministers. With no VVIP paraphernalia — red beacon-light cars, gun-totting security personnel, battery of briefcase-carrying assistants, or the experience — they do not look like nor behave like a conventional VIP.

We have had chief ministers sitting on fasts and organising bandhs, but for the first time the nation saw a chief minister sleeping on a roadside on a chilly Delhi winter night literally metres away from Parliament. He is by no yardstick “mad” as Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde has called him, but, yes, he certainly has the junoon (passion) to force a change in the political system, say his colleagues. And, yes, the change is beginning: Mr. Shinde’s home State, Maharashtra, and another Congress-ruled state, Haryana, have copied Mr. Kejriwal’s decision to reduce power tariffs. Likewise, the BJP-ruled Rajasthan and the Samajwadi Party-ruled Uttar Pradesh have cut down on security for their chief ministers. In Delhi, the police harassing petty shopkeepers, street vendors, three-wheelers, every passing truck etc. is no longer a common sight.

Mr. Kejriwal’s dharna a few yards away from the Union Home Minister’s office was as much against the Central government usurping the powers of the elected government in Delhi, as it was a flashpoint with the Delhi Police seemingly triggered by action against two police constables on charges of corruption. Mr. Kejriwal has realised that without control over the police, his government cannot deliver on its promise of ensuring the safety and security of women. The fight, therefore, appeared more to draw attention to the situation with regard to the police than to anything else. Otherwise, the AAP is the only party which has set up — much before the Bharti episode — a five-member committee on the Vishaka guidelines to look into complaints by women of harassment. The party has a 30-member gender committee headed by Lalita Ramdas, wife of Admiral Ramdas. The only three women MLAs in the Delhi Assembly belong to the AAP party.

With anti-corruption as its plank, the AAP leadership will have to brace itself for even more testing times in the run-up to the general election. Not only will it have to fend off attempts to bog it down politically, it will also have to hold its own against various lobbies, interest groups, mafias, middlemen and even media barons. To its advantage, however, the ordinary people, to whom it has given a voice and primacy, do realise that if this experiment fails then it will be back to their being reduced to fixed deposits of parties in “vote banks” to be renewed once in five years.

Interview with Yogendra Yadav of Aam Aadmi Party

Interview is in Hindi