'AAPki Dilli'

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