At some point last week, a well-wisher gifted Raghav Chadha The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, a book that has launched a thousand LinkedIn epiphanies. This was either an act of great kindness or a tongue-in-cheek response to his mawkish reel asking: “Have I done something wrong?” The jury, much like the man himself, is still out.
On Monday morning, after a weekend of reels and borrowed Bollywood bravado — “ghayal hoon, isliye ghatak hoon”; “main dariya hoon, waqt aane par sailaab banunga”; “picture abhi baaki hai” — Chadha settled into a throne-like chair in his garden with the air of a man who has been grievously wronged and intends for the universe to know it. He opened the book at Chapter One, and saw, not unlike the Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree, a great and clarifying light, which he highlighted in yellow and posted on Instagram for his detractors to see and weep.
He had always suspected it, but here it was in print: “Never Outshine the Master” — the only mistake of his prodigious political career, if it could even be called a misstep, for he could hardly apologise for his natural state of being? As he had always feared, his luminosity has eclipsed his colleagues, and the jealous lot is now hell-bent on making an example out of him. It is a terrible burden, being this gifted, and he bears it with the stoicism of an Instagram influencer.
We do not know whether Chadha read the book beyond the title of the first chapter. If he had, he might have found more missteps:
Law 47: Do Not Go Past the Mark You Aimed For. In 2022, the AAP swept Punjab with 92 seats out of 117. The correct move, if Greene is gospel, was restraint — allow authority to settle where it constitutionally belonged. Instead, Chadha extended himself, advising beyond mandate, behaving as though proximity to power were power itself. He became, by most accounts, the most powerful unelected figure in the state. The Chief Minister, who had been biding his time with the patience of a man who has seen this sort before, eventually skewered him for raising the matter of samosa rates at airports rather than the issue of the Centre withholding Punjab’s GST funds, AAP workers being rounded up in Gujarat, farmers waiting on MSP. One imagines the samosas were not even that good.
Law 11: Learn to Keep People Dependent on You. For a time, Raghav Chadha was indispensable. Then he went to London, went underground, and disconnected from colleagues and party affairs. Remove yourself, and people adjust — and in Chadha’s case, they adjusted with the brisk efficiency of an office that has even redistributed a colleague’s plant before he’s finished clearing his desk. The plant, for what it’s worth, is thriving.
Law 4: Always Say Less Than Necessary. This one he followed to the T — at the precise moment it was catastrophically wrong. When Kejriwal was arrested, when Sisodia was already in jail, when party workers were being booked across Gujarat, Chadha said nothing, issued no statement, no tweet, no reel, no word of solidarity for colleagues under siege. A leader must say less than necessary. He must, however, say something.
Law 9: Win Through Your Actions, Never Through Argument. Since being stripped of his position, Chadha has argued extensively through videos, rebuttals, challenges, and invitations to produce CCTV evidence of wrongdoing. Each well-edited rebuttal amplifies the accusation it seeks to dismiss, which is the political equivalent of a man who, on being told he talks too much, delivers a 40-minute speech in his own defence and genuinely cannot see the problem. In his mind, he is winning arguments; in practice, he is simply losing ground at a faster clip. As one great commenter posted, to the agreement of 4,435 others: “ye PR agency qafi mast hai.”
Law 5: Guard Your Reputation With Your Life. By not standing with his party in its hour of need, he damaged goodwill that no softly-lit parliamentary compilation can repair. He has acquired the reputation of a man who is elsewhere when it matters and very much present when it doesn’t.
Law 18: Isolation Is Dangerous. His garden is pleasant, the chair is comfortable, the coffee in the black mug just perfectly made, the Wi-Fi reliable, and the light, at the hour of filming, genuinely flattering. Power, however, has never been particularly impressed by good Wi-Fi. It is negotiated in rooms — contested, reinforced, lost and won in conversations Chadha is no longer part of. Remove yourself from the rooms, and decisions are made without you, and eventually, the decisions are about you.
Law 37: Create Compelling Spectacles. The carousel has over a million likes. The aesthetics are, frankly, excellent — and if Instagram followers granted Rajya Sabha tickets, Mr Chadha’s future would be assured. But the audience that will determine his next move — whoever grants the next ticket, in whichever party — is not scrolling his feed. They are in rooms he vacated, making decisions he is no longer present to influence, entirely unmoved by his engagement metrics.
Chadha has a Rajya Sabha seat until 2028 and the Punjab elections in 2027. The book contains a chapter on reinvention. One hopes he gets to it.
The writer is deputy copy editor, The Indian Express. aishwarya.khosla@expressindia.com
