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Business News/ Opinion / AAP: the good, the bad and the ugly
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AAP: the good, the bad and the ugly

Arvind Kejriwal having secured his control over the party marks the third transition of AAP since it was conceived in November 2012

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal (right) has purged the party of his opponents. Photo: PTIPremium
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal (right) has purged the party of his opponents. Photo: PTI

Over the weekend, the soap opera starring the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) reached its logical climax: expulsion of the two principal dissenters, Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, and a rallying behind Arvind Kejriwal, also a co-founder but a principal draw with the electorate. The distasteful scenes at the end, not just recriminations but allegations of physical assault, only added to the melodrama.

After having successfully imposed his diktat of ‘my way or the highway’, effectively, AAP should be rechristened as the Arvind Kejriwal Party. Whether this is good or bad, we have no clue; it may be too early to jump to conclusions.

But it definitely marks the third transition of AAP since it was conceived in November 2012—after Kejriwal, Yadav and Bhushan, among others, broke away from the fold of social activist and original anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare. And this is exactly what may hold clues as to what may eventually pan out for this political upstart who has repeatedly surprised both opponents and supporters with its ability to rebound from every challenge.

In the first phase, which was probably its best moment, it tapped into the sentiments of the general public, so ill at ease with the wrongdoings of organized politics, and generated a spontaneous groundswell of support. At this stage the defining ideology of the party was anti-corruption.

Given the spread and depth of retail corruption (as opposed to wholesale corruption like those involving allegations in the sale of telecom spectrum) this was a compelling ideology to own. And it worked very well for AAP; both Kejriwal and the party struck a chord with the electorate. I recall comparing him, in a previous edition of Capital Calculus, to a similarly audacious political force in Italian politics, Beppe Grillo . Actually Kejriwal and AAP outdid Grillo.

They surprised everyone in the 2013 Delhi assembly election falling just short of a majority—but by then it had turned Delhi’s politics on its head, turning it into a three-leg race from what was a traditional BJP vs Congress face-off. An alternative brand of politics was rapidly taking root. With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the single largest party, passing on government formation, AAP created history and took charge—its reign lasting for 49 days.

After having tasted power and the pyrotechnics it undertook to stay in the saddle, AAP seemed to undergo a further transformation. Its ideology of anti-corruption—which had been usurped by the BJP’s prime ministerial aspirant Narendra Modi—was no longer its exclusive domain. The onset of the general election forced AAP to make difficult choices; giving up on some of the methods that had served as its USP for creating an alternative discourse in politics and embracing instead the time-tested means for grabbing political power. The good seemed to give way to the bad.

At this stage AAP moved several gears into mainstreaming itself and probably sowed the seeds of its present crisis. The driving ideology became grabbing political power. The ends seem to justify the means. The party decided to go all out in the general election and contested from across the country; Kejriwal, the giant killer who downed three-time chief minister Sheila Dikshit in the New Delhi constituency, decided to take on Modi in Varanasi.

The entire contest turned out to be anything but the David and Goliath battle as some commentators had forecast. Modi decimated all the opposition and Kejriwal had to suffer a humiliating defeat in his Varanasi challenge. In Delhi, its launch pad, AAP could not win a single seat.

Predictably, the party was in ferment, which, with the benefit of hindsight, was the best-kept political secret—no one was in the know till it blew up in our faces immediately after AAP pulled off a spectacular victory in the Delhi assembly election by winning a staggering 67 out of 70 seats.

And the present is its ugliest phase. It can be surmised, largely on hindsight and the exchanges from rival factions, that after the general election defeat the party had morphed into something like the dystopian society that George Orwell wrote about in his compelling novel, 1984. There was similar distrust and mutual cynicism, which we now know turned AAP into the Republic of the Sting and a den of mutual blackmail.

Where does it leave AAP and Kejriwal? The fact that it is in political power in Delhi means that both can still claim legitimacy. But credibility with the public may have been severely dented.

At the same time, Kejriwal has purged the party of his opponents. But this may turn out be his underbelly, too. By ejecting the two co-founders, Kejriwal may have politically weakened himself and hence made himself more dependable on those who joined the party just before the Delhi assembly polls seeing a political opportunity for themselves—nothing wrong in itself, except that they have little in common with their chief minister.

On a more optimistic note, no matter what the outcome, the fact is that the idea of AAP, an alternative brand of politics, is very much alive. And ideas always outlive people.

Anil Padmanabhan is deputy managing editor of Mint and writes every week on the intersection of politics and economics. Comments are welcome at capitalcalculus@livemint.com. His Twitter handle is @capitalcalculus

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Published: 30 Mar 2015, 12:10 AM IST
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