We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
Why does that matter? Because political parties do not operate in a vacuum. It is simply not feasible to run a serious political party on declared donations alone. Political organization and campaigning require enormous resources. Successful parties in India are sustained through a complex, often hidden web of vested interests, patronage networks, and businesses that underwrite them; politicians themselves often have substantial stakes in these ecosystems. When a major political formation declines, the consequences are not confined to election results.
Sibal, I suspect, recognizes that his prospects of securing a political mandate and executive portfolio are dim at this stage of life. He is therefore doing the next best thing: first, arguing before the Hon’ble Supreme Court those causes that are, in his view, the more defensible ones aligned with his side; and second, using his YouTube channel Dil Se as a kind of liberal baithak — a forum where an earnest effort is made to produce what one might call A-grade anti-BJP propaganda. I use propaganda advisedly; all politics has its narratives. His effort, at least, seems directed at making the counter-narrative more rigorous rather than merely reflexive — even if anyone with a reasonably informed grasp of history and politics can still poke holes in much of what is advanced through that channel.
And what is in it for those of us with no political affiliation? Some measure of check and balance. However imperfect, such efforts can serve as a counterweight to a ruling dispensation that is too often exercises its writ without sufficient inclusivity or foresight.
Power is financed, as it so often is, through patronage, vested interests, corruption, and networks of mutual dependence. Kejriwal did not invent this system, he merely entered it, denouncing it on the way in, and accommodating himself to it once inside.
And then there are the quieter arrangements, the revenue streams seldom spoken of in polite company. Look closely enough and one might even discover a certain prominent and eloquent politician said to earn a tidy sum from every goat slaughtered and sold in Delhi. I shall not name him/ her/ them. Half the amusement, after all, lies in allowing others, lawyers especially, to work backwards and arrive at the conclusion themselves! ;)
One more reason can be that probably he'll be bored at home. Also he isn't actively busy in politics, so he needs somewhere to spend his time.