One Delhi is not enough to hold two political gladiators, Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi. If Kejriwal has his way, Delhi may soon have to be broken up into two, with territories ear-marked between the central and state governments. Full statehood for Delhi cannot be achieved without ceding some space — physical and administrative — to the central government. How this tussle for Delhi shapes up will have wider implications in national politics and is already putting Modi in a tight spot, even as he goes on a media blitz for his government’s one-year anniversary.

Realistically, for Delhi to get statehood, Modi’s government would have to retain areas around central Delhi, while the rest of the territory would be under Kejriwal. A ‘Lutyens District’ would have to be carved out, a bit like how the District of Columbia (Washington DC) is carved out from the state of Maryland. Washington DC is governed by US Congress, while the state of Maryland has an elected governor and legislature with the same powers as other states.

On paper this solution sounds simple enough. The geographical delineation of two Delhis would facilitate an administrative delineation. Parliament could appoint a mayor for the Lutyens District, while Kejriwal can run the state free from a Lieutenant Governor with ‘special powers.’ Delhi’s voters would get their bang for the buck: they can hold his government fully accountable for law and order and civic amenities. (And Lutyens snoots can have what they anyway consider their birthright — home rule.)

Again on paper, Modi should have no problem with this plan. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had promised Delhi full statehood in its manifesto. Add to this Modi’s own mantra of decentralising power and giving states more decision-making authority. Full statehood for Delhi is a no-brainer you would think.

But realpolitik is not played on paper. The tussle with Najeeb Jung, acting as Modi’s proxy, has once again given Kejriwal a chance to do what he loves most: punch above his weight. Kejriwal had stopped the Modi juggernaut with his stunning victory in Delhi, and his strategy is to keep being a thorn in Modi’s side till the 2019 elections, waiting for the prime minister to slip up.

If Modi does slip up — particularly if he fails to revive growth and jobs — Kejriwal wants to be the natural alternative for the opposition to coalesce around, leading up to 2019. In the meantime, Kejriwal can stay in the news by scoring such small victories over Modi, like getting full statehood for Delhi. That will only burnish his image as the eventual Modi-slayer, not just a temporary Modi-stopper.

So, with his very public clashes with the central government over bureaucratic appointments and his demand for full statehood, Kejriwal laid out a banana skin for Modi. By taking a confrontational posture with the underdog, and then getting rebuffed by the courts over the appointments, Modi’s government has stepped right on the banana skin.

Now if the BJP accepts the statehood demand, it will seem like a victory for Kejriwal. If the BJP tries to block it, Kejriwal will get to call Modi a dictator and win public sympathy.

Kejriwal’s strategy has some strengths, as well as some weaknesses. His strength is his ability to keep buzzing under Modi’s nose, irritatingly close, with his own fief in Delhi. The capital’s media density works to Kejriwal’s advantage. Because his party is small, there aren’t many distractions, while Modi has to intermittently deal with the Hindutva nutters. In the rest of the opposition — from Rahul Gandhi to Nitish Kumar or Mamata Banerjee — no one has been able to beat the Modi wave quite like Kejriwal, so the media will keep playing up any confrontation, however lopsided it may appear right now.

The weakness is the Aam Aadmi Party’s lack of organisation outside Delhi. Which means that even if there is disenchantment with Modi in the states, other parties may take better advantage of it. Kejriwal seems to have calculated that it may not take more than a year leading up to the 2019 elections to create an insurgent, build-as-you-go organisation and ride an anti-Modi wave. In the age of smartphones, social media and millions of 20-somethings who are potential cadres, it is not impossible to create a pop-up political organisation.

But Modi’s fate is in his own hands. If he is able to coolly avoid Kejriwal’s strategic provocations, while delivering on growth and jobs, he will nullify the opposition. Without an anti-Modi wave, Kejriwal’s insurgent campaign will come to naught.

On the other hand, if Modi takes his eye off the economy, gets distracted by the irritating Kejriwal under his nose and tries to quash him, then Kejriwal would have got what he really wants. This is why the Modi-Kejriwal bargain over Delhi’s statehood will be so much fun to watch and so rife with bigger implications.

Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian; Follow him on Twitter @some_buddha

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