It has a touch of Arab Spring, born through Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement There is hardly anything unexpected in the results of the assembly polls on Sunday, except the performance of the year-old Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is both stunning and stalling. It is 'stunning' as very few people believed what pollsters were whispering for some time, that the Arvind Kejriwal-led outfit in Delhi might finish ahead of Congress. However, AAP finished a hair's breadth below BJP, the largest party, 31 and 28, leaving Congress close to the bottom with only eight seats. Kejriwal himself made his debut in electoral politics by trouncing 'Ms Invincible' (Mrs Sheila Dikshit, Chief Minister for 15 years) with a dizzy margin of 25,000 plus votes. But AAP's performance was 'stalling' as it decided neither to support nor to be supported by either BJP or Congress. In a House of 70 members.
AAP itself is quite a phenomenon. It was born through transformation of activist Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement, which had a touch of the Arab Spring in its timing, and its spontaneity, into a full-scale political party, much to the chagrin of Hazare, the group's octogenarian mentor. But Kejriwal had his own ideas about a party with a mission to cleanse India's politics of decades of sleaze, secrecy and sloth. It was clear from the beginning that Kejriwal had found space for a political party that could keep its identity as an activist group and yet extend itself into the legislature. His idea may be derived from the Green parties of Europe since the 1970's, but at no time did any of the 'Greens' record an electoral performance so spectacular as AAP's in Delhi. It runs almost entirely on donations made through cheques, and donors' names and amounts are promptly announced on the party's website or one pay even pay from his credit card. Its success in mobilizing volunteers is a legend. Since its formation on October 2 last year, there was hardly any Delhi resident who wasn't buttonholed by at least one young AAP volunteer every day, wearing his trademark cotton cap, and ready to go away with a smile only if one would agree to listen to the "cause".
And Kejriwal is a top class communicator. He is neither coarse or cussed like BJP's superhero Narendra Modi, nor is he anything like the blabbering Rahul Gandhi, 'Shehzeda' of Congress as Modi likes to call him. Kejriwal, in his public appearances, strikes the audience as the man-next-door, composed even in his critique of corrupt politicians, and in a unique blend of simplicity and rigidity. He has all along functioned from his modest flat in Koshambi of Ghaziabad, a middle-class suburb in Uttar Pradesh bordering the national capital, driving a dinky car and shunning glitzy events and swanky parties.
The other side of Kejriwal is his inflexibility, and courage. When the entire media is cowering under their desk for the fear of a few mega-corporates, it is Kejriwal who openly came up with evidence of cosy nexus between one of them with both UPA Government and Modi. There were organized attempts to disrupt his Press conference but he did not budge an inch. Nor did he yield ground to political apologists of private energy companies who, according to him, were inflating costs and hiding profits with government looking the other way. He alleged that an electricity distribution company of Delhi was showing an annual loss of Rs 600 crore while it was actually earning a profit of Rs 1,900 crore. If he could come to power in Delhi, he promised to halve citizen's energy costs.
Rahul Gandhi now admits, somewhat comically though, that AAP succeeded because it "involved a lot of people". He is utterly wrong. A lot of people got involved with AAP because it touched a chord with them when it pointed at the real cause of their misery—the 'neta-corporate' nexus. Kejriwal has tapped the disgust and anger that have accumulated in the minds of the people about this unholy nexus. It worked once in the past in the 1980's, when Arun Shourie, then just a journalist, and S. Gurumurthy, an RSS pracharak and chartered accountant, published article after article in the Indian Express newspaper, till then a beacon of independent journalism, about the same nexus between industry and government. So successful was the campaign that it ended the political career of Rajiv Gandhi, only five years after his record electoral success in December 1984. The personae have changed, not the play. Kejriwal is version 2 of the same spirit of dragging the high and mighty to the people's court. His assault is even wider. While Shourie and Gurumurthy, supported by late Ramnath Goenka, the fiercely independent owner of the newspaper group, targeted only the Congress, Kejriwal has put both Modi's BJP and Congress in his cross-hair.
Will he succeed? It is difficult to foretell. AAP claims it has already set up offices in as many as 206 districts across the country, so be sure the AAP caps will soon sprout in many cities of the country. The AAP's next target will surely be Mumbai, corruption where this unholy nexus has been ruling and ruining the city. AAP’s next target is 100 plus urban seats and also travel to the rural and semi-rural areas. It is believed by political “experts” that the level of awareness is comparatively low in the rural and semi-rural areas. The fact remains that in 1989, much before the advent of satellite television and mobile phones, the message of the campaign, and its icon, V. P. Singh, had traveled so far deep into the interiors that the Congress tally got decimated by more than a half. And now, with 71 mobile phones for every 100 citizens in India, and access to aggressive 24x7 television coverage almost ubiquitous, the advantage has obviously shifted to the campaigner.
Conventional politicians and Big Business of course have their own style of quelling rebellion. But AAP’s success in Delhi will certainly ring the alarm bell in many quarters. Whether Kejriwal will succeed to put up a serious challenge to the “cozy club in Lutyen’s Delhi” in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections depends much on his luck, skill and the overall change in the political climate. But, contrary to what many Modi worshippers like to believe, AAP is not going to help the cause of any member of the establishment, notably BJP. Despite winning the largest number of seats in Delhi, BJP will not dare form government with AAP breathing on its neck. If Rahul Gandhi is ready to learn a lesson from the AAP and take steps which “you can’t even imagine”, arrogance has crept in amongst the BJP leaders after their splendid win.
(The author is National Editor
of Lokmat group of newspapers
and based in Delhi)
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