EDITORIALS

AAP at the Crossroads

Futile tactical approaches to governance and failure to build on its success in Delhi have hurt AAP.

xpectations that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) would

continue to build upon its early promise have been
dashed. In the 16th Lok Sabha elections, the party
fielded candidates in nearly 430 constituencies, but managed
to win only four seats, these in Punjab, barely making a dent
elsewhere. Most of its leading activists and prominent figures
who got ample media coverage for spearheading the anticorruption campaign lost badly in the elections. Following
such disappointing results, AAP has been further bruised
by desertions.
The foremost reasons for the partys poor performance in the
Lok Sabha elections have much to do with AAPs tactical errors
and the choices made since the Delhi state assembly elections of
December 2013. After showing an initial reluctance to form a
government in the union territory of Delhi, AAP decided to take
the reins in January 2014 with support from the Congress Party.
The short-lived government, which survived for a mere 49 days,
introduced a few popular policy measures apart from seeking to
bring law and order under the control of the provincial government. Some of the policy measures were not necessarily well
thought out; yet, the power subsidy and lowered tariff rates for
water including the provision of free water supply for a limited
quantity were well received. The party, despite not having a
clear majority in the assembly, tried to pass its version of a
Lokayukta Bill that sought to create an independent ombudsman for the union territory.
After its failure to pass the bill due to opposition from both
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress, and being
under constant media attention, AAP suddenly decided to resign
from the government, apparently believing that failure to fulfil
some of its main promises was going to hurt its electoral prospects in the Lok Sabha polls. This decision to resign so quickly
and of reducing the act of being in power to simply fulfilling
an abstract promise of delivering a perfect anti-corruption
entity was not merely an abrupt one. It betrayed AAPs lack of
understanding of the nuances of government, statecraft or
even its ability to read the mandate it was provided with in the
assembly elections. After all, the rise to power of AAP was
facilitated by a combination of support from the middle classes
and the urban poor who had clear and somewhat distinct
expectations of qualitatively better governance. The urban poor
were dismayed by the decision to quit, as their core concerns
of price rise of essential commodities such as electricity and
water supply remained unattended.
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More than in Delhi, AAPs reckless resignation hurt its electoral prospects elsewhere as political opponents went to town
accusing the fledgling party of irresponsibility and dependence
merely on crusading politics. Pinned on the defensive, AAPs
belated decision to adopt an anti-BJP strategy focused on taking
on the old and new strongholds of the then leading opposition
party by highlighting its corrupt and skewed developmental
record yielded meagre returns. But it did induce a voter shift
away from the long-time incumbent Shiromani Akali Dal (the
major ally of the BJP in Punjab) and earned isolated pockets of
support for AAP candidates. The spirited campaign of AAP convenor and former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal only
managed to take him to a distant second place in Varanasi.
AAPs electoral strategy was further hamstrung by its decision
to do the very opposite of what it had done in the run-up to the
state assembly elections in Delhi. The party had then focused
on an intense micro-campaign by organising at the grass roots
in a dense urban concentration for a limited period (nearly a
year), which earned it immediate success both organisationally
as well as politically. For the Lok Sabha elections, though, the
party thought it better to spread itself thin, fielding candidates
all across India without giving any thought to its limited organisational strength. Fittingly, more than 90% of the candidates
lost their electoral deposits, as many of them were left without
any organisational support.
AAP is now at the crossroads. Its success in leveraging the
anti-corruption campaign to launch a political party that
postured as a social-democratic, secular outfit allowed it to
rapidly usurp the traditional support of the Congress Party in
limited areas. But reliance on an ad hoc, crusading approach,
and reluctance to treat the seat of power as an agency to effect
substantive change points to a lack of maturity. Even now, AAP
could envision itself as a social-democratic party, committed to
purposive welfare and opposed to crony capitalism. But its
own ambivalence and its reluctance to define its position in the
political spectrum deliberately intended to buy support from
both the upper middle classes and the poor have forced it into
the mould of an ad hoc crusader.
Will AAP shift to a substantive discourse and try to occupy the
now vacant social-democratic space (following the Congress
and the lefts resounding defeats) in the national polity? Alternatively, will it be bound by its previous avatar of a limited
social movement deluded by the importance accorded to it by a
short-sighted mass media?
june 14, 2014

vol xlix no 24

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly