BackAAP knows it’s smart to be patient
By sticking to its stated ethos, the AAP is saying that it values its principles more than power
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That Delhi is headed for President’s rule should come as no surprise. With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) four seats short of a clear majority in the 70-member assembly, and ahead of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) by only four, the graffiti on the wall was quite unambiguous.
The results had shocked the BJP and the Congress, and the best they could have hoped for in the circumstances is to let the AAP form a government and wait for it to dig its own grave. After all, hardly any of its MLAs have previous experience in administration. Also, how long would the party been able to stick to its high moral principles once it was in power? Both parties would have loved to see the AAP, once the loaves and fishes of power were within its reach, become a clone of all other Indian political parties. In other words, they were hoping for a perverse political version of a level playing field. Unfortunately, for the BJP and the Congress, that has not happened. Kejriwal and company have turned out to be smarter. And the most significant aspect of their smarts is that they are willing to be patient.
The BJP would have been stupid to try to run a minority government. The AAP would have formed a very powerful Opposition and would have relentlessly attacked any government policy that did not fit its agenda. The government would hardly have been able to function. The threat of a successful no-confidence motion would have always hung over its head, and the Congress, with its eight members, would have been far more powerful in the assembly than the size of its contingent would otherwise imply (the joke going around in Delhi the day after the election results were out was that one Toyota Innova was big enough to carry all the Congress MLAs around). The Congress would in fact hold the balance of power, though, after its dramatically poor showing, it is debatable whether it would have made any sense for the party to do anything but lie low while the BJP government faced flak from the AAP.
The AAP has always maintained that it would ally neither with the Congress nor the BJP, and it has stuck to its stance by telling the Lieutenant Governor that it was not in a position to form a government. However, if it had formed a government, it would perhaps been in much better shape than a BJP government. The AAP’s stated economic agenda is populist to the extreme—read ‘socialist’—and as Indian legislative history has repeatedly shown, Oppositions are loath to attack such moves, even if they have the numbers to block them. Anyway, many of the promises that the AAP made in its election manifesto could have been fulfilled through administrative orders, without any need to go to the legislature. And if the AAP failed to pass a Bill in the assembly, and the government fell, the party could have safely gone into martyr mode, which may have well increased its number of seats in the next elections.
The Congress, meanwhile, has been up to its old tricks, offering “unconditional support" to the AAP. The strategy is twofold and rather transparent. One, if we are offering you the numbers to form a government, and you still refuse, this can only mean that you were never serious about taking on responsibility and accountability. Ergo, you are just a bunch of holier-than-thou troublemakers, and now you are clearly betraying your supporters and voters. Two, this gives the Congress time to rethink, regroup, re-whatever, take some credit for whatever the AAP government does that goes down well with the electorate, and withdraw support at an opportune moment.
The AAP has neatly put the ball back in the Congress’ court by listing 18 conditions for it to accept any support. What worked with Charan Singh and Chandrashekhar and Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral hasn’t worked with Arvind Kejriwal and company. Yes, by rejecting, in effect, the Congress’s offer, the AAP would surely have irritated some of its voters, even some if its MLAs. But, by sticking to its stated ethos, the AAP is saying that it values its principles more than power. It is also politically astute suddenly put the Congress in a tight spot. The AAP’s message is clear: not a Common Minimum Programme, but an Accepted Maximum Programme.
My way, or all of us wait on the highway.
So what happens next? My bet is that if the Delhi assembly elections are held within the next three months, the AAP will get a comfortable majority on its own. It’s quite valid to assume that many would-be AAP voters didn’t turn up at the election booths or voted for their second-choice party because they doubted that AAP candidates could win. In fact, the sharp minds running the AAP campaign realized early on that they needed to convince the electorate of the party’s “winnability". This, the party tried to do by running its own opinion polls and publicizing results that showed that a very large number of Delhiites preferred Kejriwal over Sheila Dikshitand Harsh Vardhan as chief minister, and that the party could even win a majority of seats in the assembly. The strategy seems to have worked brilliantly, and the next time round, the remaining doubters and fence-sitters could very well join the flock.
As for the Congress—this may sound rather bold, but the party seems to be finished for the time being in Delhi, whether it’s the next assembly polls or Lok Sabha elections. Just one fact should suffice to lend weight to this prediction. When the lady who has been chief minister for 15 years gets trounced by a new challenger (who polled nearly 60% of all votes cast in a three-cornered contest) in a constituency whose voter list predominantly comprises central and state government staff, her party is in real big trouble.
The only way the BJP can hope to improve its tally in the Delhi assembly is if the re-elections are held along with the Lok Sabha polls, and there is a “Modi wave", and Delhiites are swayed by that to vote for the party at both state and central levels.
In the meantime, the AAP has tasted blood. It will now try to make inroads into Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. A new product has been successfully launched in a test market, and a gradual national roll-out will follow. What the product’s final market share will be, one does not know yet, but one can say with some certainty that the market has been thoroughly shaken up.
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