The departure of seven MPs from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is unfolding a situation that is bruising, public and irreversible. It admittedly elicits a vicarious sense of justice among those who watched the AAP weaponise falsehood against the Congress for over a decade. The lies were elaborate, the propaganda industrious, and the damage real. Schadenfreude, in this instance, is not an entirely dishonourable emotion.And yet, two wrongs have never made a right. Alongside this spectacle of self-implosion runs a far more sinister story: the BJP’s continued practice of purchasing mandates through lure and coercion, of engineering defections, of bending democratic institutions to achieve what Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideologues have long dreamed of: a single-party state. The AAP crisis cannot be allowed to obscure that existential threat to Indian democracy. The promise that was never meant to be keptLet’s recall 2011. A man in a Gandhi topi stood at Jantar Mantar and spoke of an India scrubbed clean of corruption. Arvind Kejriwal had won the Magsaysay Award for championing the Right to Information. He had filed a signed affidavit pledging never to use an official car or government bungalow. He had demanded a Lokpal so powerful it could, in the words borrowed from his Janlokpal Bill, “break open the almirahs of the Prime Minister.” Gullible, idealistic, genuinely good-hearted Indians believed him. They believed because they wanted to believe.Today, that same man travels in large cavalcades at public expense. He fought bitterly in court to secure a Lutyens’ Delhi bungalow. His official chief minister’s residence was refurbished at a cost that scandalised even his admirers. Also read: Arvind Kejriwal Should Realise the Allure of Jantar Mantar is MisplacedAs admin incharge of the Congress Party, I may also take the liberty of sharing that no top leader of Congress has ever misused public funds to have a luxurious living. The bungalows belonging to the Gandhi’s even have a spartan style. People were merrily amused to see the kitchen of Sonia Gandhi, when Rahul Gandhi released a video discussing food with his mother. It was simply a middle-class kitchen of the 80s. Frugal living! The Lokpal that Kejriwal once made a national cause has now become a historical footnote. No one today even recalls that India has one. And the Lokayukta in Delhi? Kejriwal stonewalled its appointment for years. Punjab’s Lokayukta, first appointed under a Congress government, survives, but the official website is not consistently accessible to the public. The fraud on the people of India is total.One important historical correction must be made here. The Lokpal movement was not Kejriwal’s original idea – it was mooted decades ago by Shanti Bhushan, leading lawyer and politician. It was Sonia Gandhi who resolved to legislate a Lokpal, announcing it in her presidential address at the Burari convention of the AICC in 2011. It was her sincerity and political will that produced the Lokpal Act during UPA-2, after extensive consultations and study by a joint parliamentary committee.Kejriwal was an opportunist who recognised a wave already created by Congress, rode it and then, with shameless cunning, turned it against the very party that had initiated it. Congress’s own failure to forcefully underline Sonia Gandhi’s foundational contribution is a matter of serious introspection.The ideology-free vacuum and its consequencesAAP’s most lasting and most corrosive legacy is not corruption. It is the active delegitimisation of ideology itself. Kejriwal did not merely lack a political ideology. He propagandised against the very concept. He presented ideology as an obstacle to governance, a distraction from the practical business of delivering services. Governance, he insisted, was a managerial problem, not a moral or political one.This was a profoundly dangerous idea. It created an ideological vacuum in Indian politics at precisely the moment when the RSS-BJP combine was prepared to fill any available space with its far-right, communal, anti-constitutional worldview. AAP’s assault was directed specifically at the constitutional, republican, secular legacy of the Congress, the legacy of Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, and the independence movement. It succeeded in weakening that tradition. And into the space it cleared, marched something far darker.The consequences were predictable. A party without ideological moorings must navigate by the winds of popular sentiment. Kejriwal chose to be led by surveys rather than values, mob mood rather than constitutional principle. This is majoritarianism. Not democratic, not egalitarian, but a system that finds a common enemy, inflames primal passions, and converts public anger into personal power.The Delhi riots of February 2020 were the most devastating verdict on this ideology-less governance. A city under the AAP government burned. Then the chief minister, for days, he was conspicuously absent, silent and passive. When AAP did speak, it found its voice to malign the Tablighi Jamaat over COVID-19. It was a baseless, communally charged attack on a Muslim organisation. The party that had claimed to stand above communalism collapsed, silently, into it. The mirror and the originalIn retrospect, the structural similarity between AAP and BJP was always hiding in plain sight. Both built their power on a cult of personality. Both weaponised media. The RTI champion, Kejriwal moved first to exclude journalists from Delhi Secretariat the moment he came to power, a playbook Modi had already written in Gujarat and would later deploy nationally. Both relied on the management of popular sentiment.The difference is this: Modi’s BJP is honest about its authoritarianism within its support base. The RSS’s communal project is no secret to those who vote for it. The edifice is aligned with the foundation. AAP, by contrast, built a democratic facade over an authoritarian structure. When the facade fell, as it inevitably must, there was nothing behind it. You cannot sustain a political movement that rides on democratic and republican aspirations while delivering an authoritarian regime. The supporters of AAP were not ill-intentioned; they were deceived. And deceit, unlike conviction, has no endurance.The values that survivedFifteen years of this experiment have produced an unexpected clarity. The values that Congress brought to Indian governance and politics, however imperfectly realised, however often betrayed in practice, now shine with a distinction they did not have before. The democratic republic that the Congress movement built was designed to withstand assault. It has withstood the BJP. It has survived AAP. It endures.This republic is so robust that even its enemies must pay it tribute. The BJP wraps its authoritarianism in the language of democracy. AAP camouflaged its ideology-less majoritarianism in the vocabulary of transparency and good governance. The constitutional framework of India compels even those, who would dismantle it, to pretend allegiance to it.Also read: Opposition Accuses BJP of ‘Weaponising Agencies’ After AAP Acquittals in Liquor Policy CaseThe task of defending that framework falls, today, most visibly on Rahul Gandhi. His political journey has been described as a string of electoral losses. That description misses the point. He has chosen to fight on the most difficult terrain. Against a government that commands state machinery, that dominates social media algorithms designed to amplify mob sentiment, that has the resources of incumbency and the ruthlessness of ideological certainty. He could have made it easier on himself. The language of majoritarianism, of religious division, of communal passions, is not unknown to him or to Congress. It would be electorally convenient. He has refused it.That refusal will be judged differently by history than it is today. Valiant fights that save constitutional values may take time to deliver. But such fights are not always recorded as victories in the election returns column. But they are recorded as historical intervention.A word to AAP’s honest supportersTo those who supported AAP because they genuinely believed in better governance, in transparency, in a more honest republic: your instincts were not wrong. Your trust was exploited. The fog of propaganda that was used to deceive you has now lifted. The edifice you thought you were building has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.What remains standing, however imperfectly, is the Congress tradition. The tradition of the freedom movement, of the Constitution, of a pluralist, secular, egalitarian India. It has not always delivered on its promises. It has had its own failures and betrayals. But it has an ideological spine. And in a moment when that spine is under assault from every direction, it is the only tradition that can anchor the republic.The visibility is now clear. It is time to look at what is actually there and join hands.Gurdeep Sappal is a Permanent Invitee to the Congress Working Committee.