Tomar and Bharti now Arvind Kejriwal's Achilles' heel

NEW DELHI: Delhi Police Commissioner B S Bassi is hardly the type you would associate with powerful bites, known to be laconic to the point of being frustrating. On Tuesday, he was anodyne as usual yet categorical that Jitendra Tomar had to be arrested for reaching the kingpin of a fake degree scam which is playing havoc with youths.

The claim has the potential of changing the terms of debate over Tomar's arrest that AAP has tried to frame as another case of Modi government's high-handedness to avenge BJP's debacle in assembly elections. AAP's efforts suffered a blow on Wednesday when Awadh University endorsed the charge of Delhi Police that Tomar has a forged degree.

Questions were already being asked about why Kejriwal chose to hold on to Tomar when his CV had always looked suspicious. The police case against the former law minister makes the Chief Minister's judgement even more intriguing and has raised the political cost of sticking to him in defiance of in-house advice.

Taken together with the case of domestic violence against another Kejriwal aide, former law minister Somnath Bharti, the "fake degree" case complicates matters for a fledgling government at a time when it is en gaged in a high-stakes war of wits over urisdictional issues with the Modi government. In fact, after his stunning landslide, things don't seem to have gone Kejriwal's way . The revolt by Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav stripped AAP much of its innocence. The process was taken forward by their callous and inept response to the tragic death of a farmer at a Kejriwal rally .

The Tomar and Somnath issues show that AAP could be in for a long tryst with troubles which will have a bearing on its fight with the Modi government. LG Najeeb Jung's response to Kejriwal's aggressive moves to become the "real" master of the capital shows that the Centre is not ready to blink, and would not be deterred by the enormous mandate Kejriwal secured.

Always a fighter, Kejriwal is not going to concede. But as he seeks to engage the Modi government in a long battle of attrition, he will find room for missteps diminishing. Congress' aggressive demonstration to demand Kejriwal's resignation on the ground that he had shielded a "tainted" minister in his government showed that it is not just BJP which is not in the awe of this massive mandate. The need for Kejriwal to measure up to swing constituencies like the middle class as well as to deliver basic services to the core constituency is more acute than a week ago.