Much has been said and written about how the fate
of the Aam Aadmi Party changed on February 10, 2015. This electoral victory did
not only change India’s political narrative but gave an impetus to an
alternative style of politics. From a
bunch of anti-corruption crusaders to a political behemoth that catapulted the
national stage through its 49-day political coup in Delhi, to the party that
was decimated in the national elections of 2014, to the resounding victory
enamoured by a clean sweep in the Delhi elections of 2015. The Aam Aadmi Party
has come a long way.
Many suggest that the resounding victory for the
AAP is simply inexplicable. There is no doubt that the numbers stacked by the
AAP were unexpected; a safe majority had been predicted by pollsters, but a
clean sweep was far beyond anyone’s expectation. The reasons for this
inexplicable and thunderous victory are by far varied. Except for the Sikkim
Democratic Front, no party has ever won more than 95 per cent of the seats. Nor
has a party been reduced to losing more than 90 per cent deposits in a state
where it used to rule just two years ago. If the AAP has resurrected itself
spectacularly and the Congress has finally auto-destructed (not Rahul Gandhi’s
fault of course), the BJP has been lucky in getting a stern warning early on in
the national electoral cycle. Amid all
the nuances of psephology and the complications of sociology, the Aam Aadmi
Party’s spectacular victory signifies ‘hope’. Hope that had deserted the Indian
voter in the past decade. Indian voters are looking for agents of change rather
than stasis, hope instead of easy cynicism, aspiration instead of fear, optimism
instead of defeatism, and the future instead of the past.
But has the AAP defied the mighty rhetoric of the
Indian politics that casts ideology in binary opposites of caste, gender,
economy, religion and class? The Aam Aadmi Party has accepted that it follows a
solution-centric and ideology-free approach that is neither left nor right and
has openly renounced traditional frameworks of “secularism” and “social justice”
through caste based politics. Has
politics now become less about ideologies, programmes, buyouts and freebies and
more about psychological compatibility with the electorate?
The AAP has defined new grammar in the language of
Indian politics- the grammar of democratic experimentalism. In Arvind Kejriwal,
it has a leader who, even in disagreement, exudes a sincerity that is
impossible to match. He did what no politician has done in India. When he made
a mistake, he simply said sorry. Psychological compatibility requires the
projection of qualities that are not simple to project: sincerity, credibility,
perhaps even a sense of adventure. The
AAP was highly successful in this exercise of image building that contributed
to the personality cult of Arvind Kejriwal. Which is why politics is always
more contingent. Voters are willing to give a chance to those who, at a given
moment, best represent this new disposition.
Has Arvind
Kejriwal altered the paradigm of Indian politics? The Aam Aadmi Party has played with a
politically straight bat avoiding theatrics and delving deep into the romanticism
of ‘bijli paani’. It has sharpened the battle against plutocracy, a major
poison in Indian democracy. In terms of long-term structural changes, there are
two tantalising possibilities that it brings with it. The first is the creation
of a new institutional culture. This includes not just the performative
dimensions of the relationship between politics and the people, but also far-reaching
institutional changes by means of which authority and accountability could be
relocated in ways that are more functional.
Secondly, in
the political gaaliyans of Delhi, it had become fashionable to portray the Aam
Aadmi Party as unleashing another populist class war, fiscally imprudent and
insensitive to growth. This was a gross exaggeration unleashed by those who
were engaging in class warfare and they were proved wrong by the electrifying
mandate given to AAP. But the central challenge facing India and more so Delhi,
is how to create cultures of negotiation around important issues which does not
oscillate between cronyism and populism. In our country, the rich have evaded
accountability by raising the spectre of class warfare, and the poor have been
cheated by populism. There has to be a liberal critique of oligarchy at the
top, and a social democratic critique of populism at the bottom. Let us hope
the AAP is the harbinger of this change.
What the AAP is
experimenting with is not a grand theory of overthrow or revolution but one of
enlarging the public space within the existing structures. It is not premised
on upheavals of one sort or another, but on an incremental claiming of rights
that have, in practice, been denied to the common people, the aam aadmis. The
question that hounds us is; will this experiment evaporate into thin air? There
is no guarantee that it will survive the expected onslaught of vested
interests. But there is no guarantee that it will succumb to threats or
temptations held out by vested interests either. Kejriwal has always laid
stress on the sincerity of intentions and shown no sign of wavering from them. But
if it is important to keep one’s scepticism alive, especially when it comes to
leaders, it is equally important to grant them honesty and commitment to a
cause until such time as they contravene it. It is the simple principle of
“innocent until proven guilty”.
The Delhi election
is an apt reminder that in a democracy people’s support is always conditional
and subject to continuous assessment. The AAP became an embodiment of this idea
and received overwhelming support. So long as this need remains unaddressed,
similar political experiments will continue to surface and people will continue
to script similar success stories that may baffle the more established political
parties
