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Business News/ Opinion / Filtering the muck
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Filtering the muck

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal is a man in a hurry, and there is not much time left for the 2014 polls

Political observers who have written about how the AAP is different from the other parties have generally tended to focus on their campaign strategies or the unique appeal they held for voters and citizens. Photo: HT Premium
Political observers who have written about how the AAP is different from the other parties have generally tended to focus on their campaign strategies or the unique appeal they held for voters and citizens. Photo: HT

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is in a strange strategic dilemma: expansion or consolidation? On the one hand, the spectacular success in its inaugural electoral battle has meant that the momentum is with the party. Conventional political logic dictates that it should cash in on this momentum in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. But if it tries to do so, which essentially means growing too big, too fast, it runs the danger of diluting the core values that made it an appealing political formation in the first place.

The more rational approach, from a long-term point of view, would be to focus on consolidation before expansion. This would entail concentrating on delivering in Delhi first, so that the city becomes a secure base for the party—which, all the euphoria notwithstanding, it still is not—from where it could steadily direct its expansion plans. It would also mean taking the time to carefully winnow new leadership, and not simply go by the probability of winning an election (a certain Vinod Kumar Binny comes to mind).

But Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal is a man in a hurry, and there is not much time left for the 2014 polls. So, not surprisingly, everything points to the AAP pursuing the grow-first, grow-fast strategy. The massive membership drives in the aftermath of the Delhi triumph are a part of this strategy, and these, according to media reports, have been wildly successful.

Going by the AAP’s own numbers as well as anecdotal evidence, it would appear that everybody and his uncle (and the uncle’s property dealer-turned-politician son) is joining the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). But the flood of new members (who will also form the pool from which future leaders will be picked) also brings with it a new problem—filtering the muck, and the phraseology is not mine but AAP leader Yogendra Yadav’s.

In an interview to this publication last month, Yadav, in answer to a question about the limitations of his party, spoke about “the challenge of filtering a lot of muck that has come our way. When you face this kind of flood, flood carries with it water, it also carries a lot of junk with it." While Yadav’s prescience in foreseeing the junk is admirable, it is not clear how serious the AAP is about the filtration process, assuming it has one at all.

In today’s India, an average citizen interested in entering politics has little hope of making it unless he already belongs to a political family or is extremely wealthy. In many cases, even with both these conditions fulfilled, for some reason or the other, many fail to obtain from their party bosses the all-important ticket for contesting elections.

Political observers who have written about how the AAP is different from the other parties have generally tended to focus on their campaign strategies or the unique appeal they held for voters and citizens. But there is another fundamental way in which the AAP is different: its ideological agnosticism. This feature makes it attractive to political opportunists of every hue: anyone from the bigger parties who is disgruntled, and knows she will not get a ticket; anyone who is wealthy enough to self-finance an election campaign but with no interest in, or track record of, ground-level political work; anyone who is politically ambitious but has neither the connections for a sideways entry into the upper echelons of a party nor the patience to slowly work one’s way up the hierarchy; and lastly, anyone with an agenda that has nothing to do with that of the AAP’s but sees in it a quick route to political power.

In a way, such openness is central to why the AAP, both as an idea and as a party, is so exciting and attractive to a wide spectrum of political wannabes, for it then offers itself up as a space that, unlike other political formations, is still susceptible to being molded by democratic means, by whoever wants to join it. It’s like saying, if you like what we are doing, join us. And if you don’t like what we are doing, join us and nudge us in the direction you want us to go. So there is indeed a lot of chatter among so-called progressives about the need to join the AAP in droves in order to save this precious new political platform from being completely hijacked by the presumably regressive elements such as the Somnath Bhartis and the Kumar Vishwases.

But as the curious case of Somnath Bharti made evident, it is not clear how the aam progressive can influence AAP politics when even the khaas progressives such as Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan seem powerless to do so. If the AAP’s muck filtration process had been working properly, Bharti would not have gotten the backing of the AAP leadership following his midnight misadventure in Khirki Extension. There is simply no way a leader accused of racism can continue as a cabinet minister of a party that is supposedly a bastion of ethical politics. And yet, because racism does not, apparently, have a bearing on the AAP’s singular agenda of corruption (defined in narrow, monetary terms), Bharti carries on.

So how then does a political infant such as the AAP, which needs a whole lot of new members and leaders—and fast—to grow and compete with much larger, seasoned, rivals, ensure that the muck does not erode the core, older base of supporters who were attracted to the party by its idea and not -- as is certainly the case with a segment of its newer members—by its success?

In the absence of a political ideology, however broadly defined, this is impossible to do. And what you get instead is a party that speaks in multiple tongues, and hopes to pass off political opportunism as pluralism and the resultant confusion as diversity.

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Published: 11 Feb 2014, 12:54 PM IST
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