It is not very often that a political party is discussed even before it has made its electoral debut. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), formally launched in late 2012, seems to have acquired that distinction. While Shukla takes a careful look at the vision document of the party, Anand Kumar presents a formal statement on behalf of the party. But such politically correct statements and intentions are not adequate grounds for the assessment of parties and organisations wanting to intervene in the political process. The ability to intervene, the direction of intervention and, above all, the social character of that intervention constitute the criteria for such assessments. For such an assessment, it is necessary to turn to the context that produced this new party and the issues that the founding group raised even before it was formed.
As of now, the AAP is an addition to the already crowded list of “registered unrecognised” parties. In January 2013, the Election Commission of India listed 1,392 such parties.1 Will the AAP be just one among this lot? And if it is indeed a “different” party, what exactly is the difference? As Anand Kumar makes clear, the party itself would like to be different in that it is a combination of a party and a movement. As a party it pitches itself against all other parties, not just as another competitor, but also as a force that seeks to undermine the bases of existing party politics. As a movement, it intends to sustain the momentum for the urban protests that it triggered and turn those protests into something more tangible and durable.
This note intends to discuss the context in which the party (AAP) emerged and how that context shapes both its radical democratic stance and the politics of anti-political establishment.
The Context
Obviously, the party thinks that it can break the monopoly of the “established” parties and gatecrash into the system. In all probability, the party’s first political test would come when it contests the Delhi Assembly election later this year. As it is, Delhi has been the theatre carefully chosen by the party even before it came into being. It is ironical that at a time when the theatre of politics has shifted away from Delhi, a party of reform should choose to project itself from the grounds and roads of the national capital without much grassroots organisation elsewhere in the country to precede it.
The other problem associated with the party right from the time prior to its inception has been its deep engagement with the media. The manner in which the party and the pre-party agitation was pitched made a love affair between the party and the media possible. To be fair, one could say that this is not an instance of the media setting the agenda; perhaps, it is the skilful handling of the new media that has helped the anti-corruption agitation and the AAP to launch themselves so visibly into the national political arena. But at a minimum, it is certainly a case of “mediatisation” of politics. In this process, the presentation of views becomes an important source of information and opinion formation for those sections, who are “without party identification”, who are “apolitical but sophisticated” caught in the midst of the crisis of the party system – exactly the constituency that the anti-corruption agitation and later the AAP tapped/is tapping.
The formation of the AAP is a culmination of the agitation that began in 2011 on the issue of a law for establishing an effective machinery to curb corruption in politics and bureaucracy. That agitation had the following tendencies. First, it was, in its broader sense, against corruption in public life (though the agitation and its residue even today confine themselves to the magic wand called the Jan Lokpal). Second, because the participants and many of its leaders felt that politicians tend to be more corrupt than the rest of society, the anti-corruption agitation expressed deep anxieties about politics and political parties. Third, that agitation did not have any socio-economic agenda and this fact helped it in generating support. The absence of an agenda meant that there would be less cross-cutting social cleavages that would undermine the agitation and its single-point anti-corruption mobilisation. Fourth, the agitation nurtured a romantic objective of making our democracy more real and people-based rather than representative-based. Thus, the agitation combined a paradoxical mix of cynicism towards politics and a radical democratic goal.
While the claims of the supporters make us believe that many parts of the country were engulfed by the agitation, this is a contestable claim. If anything, the agitation was an urban phenomenon – visible more in large cities and made more visible by the electronic media. This is not to say that corruption is not an issue for a large number of people – if you ask people whether corruption is an issue, of course they would endorse that statement. However, corruption is often down the list of main concerns – after price rise, employment and the like. Thus, to a straight question on whether the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is corrupt, 28% of the respondents said it was very corrupt. More importantly, while 38% of the respondents believed that the situation regarding corruption had deteriorated, 50% thought that the situation regarding rising prices had deteriorated.2 This indicates that while corruption was seen as a major issue, people were aware of the other (more) pressing matters. When we ask someone if corruption is an issue, they would surely answer in the positive. However, when asked to name the “most important problem”, corruption is 14th in the list, with only 1% of the respondents mentioning it.
These details are instructive. They suggest that when there is a lot of discussion in the media on matters related to corruption and when people are specifically asked about corruption, they are bound to be critical of and concerned about the issue of corruption. However, this surely does not support a conclusion that today corruption has become the most central issue in the politics of the country.
This detour allows us to be cautious in assuming that corruption has become the key issue or that a sustained political struggle can be run on this issue or that a party can survive mainly on the basis of anti-corruption sentiments and exposes of corruption by politicians. Therefore, it becomes a moot question as to whether a party born out of and fed on anti-corruption sentiment and agitation can be a sustainable political force. If the party adopts only an anti-corruption agenda it is likely to limit itself to the hardcore of the anti-corruption crusade; if it broadens its agenda it is likely to lose its supporters who gathered around it without agreeing to many political positions the party later takes.
Populist Notions of Democracy
But the AAP may say that theirs is not just an anti-corruption platform; it is a party of political reform and better democratic practice. Both the early followers of the pre-AAP agitation and at least some of its key founding figures appear to have an affinity towards a radical conception of democracy. At one level, this stems from the critique of the practice of representative democracy. At another level, there seems to be a populist notion behind it. More than the single-point agenda of corruption that marked the beginning of the party, this aspect is somewhat more worrisome. There are always various suggestions regarding the reform and democratisation of the political process. These include the right to reject, right to recall, citizens’ initiative in formulating bills and legislative proposals, and wide-ranging decentralisation or localisation of decision-making powers.
To begin with, these proposals need to be juxtaposed with the actual experience of popular participation. That helps us appreciate the gap between the empirical citizen and the ideal citizen. Beyond voting, the level of popular participation is fairly limited – both in India and elsewhere in most other “democracies”. The National Election Study of 2009 and 2004 show that participation in election meetings has been on an average 23% and participation in election rallies has been just around 13%. Among the more active citizens, there is an under-representation of women, dalits and adivasis. Moreover, not more than 7 to 9% of the respondents are interested in “politics beyond voting and elections”.4 In such circumstances, right to recall and right to initiate legislations are measures that will allow the more articulate sections to have a greater say in the political process than they enjoy today.
It may appear paradoxical, but “expansion” of democracy in this manner does not always help democracy; it has a tendency to make democracy more selective and elitist. Thus, besides practicability, the restrictive nature of democratising measures is a crucial issue. Such democratising measures presuppose an equal citizenry in terms of social status and economic position so that status and livelihood constraints do not hamper the citizen’s chance to actually participate in the decision-making process.
As mass democracies emerged, the two tasks of democratisation and levelling of citizens’ actual socio-economic endowments separated and did not develop in a symmetric manner. As a result we now encounter citizenship that is marked by political equality and non-equal socio-economic situations. Against this backdrop, the ideas of expanding democratic involvement of the citizens are not only romantic, they also tend to undermine political equality. The question that AAP and supporters of such “more democracy” need to ask themselves is: do we want to expand democratic rights but effectively restrict their scope?
Shades of Anarchism
On the other hand, ideas of recall and legislative initiative also have a shade of political anarchism to them. Recall in particular is a recipe for chaos and undermining the system’s ability to run. Even at the local level, the recall provisions have been (rightly) tempered with provisos (such as no recall if one fails, and stipulations that no-confidence motions in panchayats can be moved only after a certain period has elapsed since the last election). The insistence on recall and such other procedures, however, are very attractive to those sections who want to see greater accountability of the representatives.
These measures are also popular because they tend to undermine the system of representative politics. In this sense, the AAP talks of “destroying” the system as the system is seen as a product of a fraudulent notion of democracy. If the representative system were to be destroyed, the first disenfranchisement will happen in the case of the poor, semi-literate sections with low socio-economic status. Therefore, the radical and seemingly revolutionary talk of unsettling the system becomes very problematic.
Besides, the solution in terms of decentralisation, local democracies and limiting the powers of central government requires careful consideration. The marginalised sections may find themselves more isolated and powerless if extra powers are vested at the local level. Democratic societies have yet to arrive at a satisfactory response to this dilemma – local power is the essence of democracy but local powers are more conservative, blind to the injustices of the local environments and antithetical to individual rights and entitlements. To wit, as the location of power becomes distant, the possibility of detaching it from traditional hierarchies is greater. Unless a community of roughly equal citizens exists, local power can become a romance with local repression. Any political intervention intending to undertake political reform will have to take into account this dimension and strike a very delicate balance between location of democratic power (of governance) and the loci of social power (of domination).
Associated with this issue of political reform is another complex issue of party building. It is not an easy task to graduate from a network of organisations, activists and like-minded actors into a political machine that is capable of serious intervention. As the AAP may be finding out already, when a new party is coming into being there is considerable excitement and rush among the politically more enthusiastic sections to join the party and own it. Their intention might sometimes be altruistic; they may also be instrumental at times.
A party that seeks to adopt very open procedures for designating its office holders runs the risk of being hijacked or being taken over by those who may have different ideas from those of the founders and more active members. During the India Against Corruption (IAC) phase, the agitation was repeatedly charged of being run by various elements such as the Sangh parivar, etc. Similarly, others (who are interested in destroying the system) may also take over the party at the ground level. Here too, how to balance democratic and open functioning, and interests and ideas that are central to the party is going to prove tough.
Anti-establishment Potential
The democratic ideas of the AAP need to be further problematised in the context of visible signs of anti-politics during the anti-corruption agitation. There is tension between the anti-politics sentiments of a large constituency that initially gathered around the pre-party agitation (some of whom later got attracted to the party in its initial phase) and the objective of cleansing and reforming politics that the party has adopted now.
The young urban professionals who seem to have found a cause in the anti-corruption agitation manifested deep anxieties about the politician and the political realm. They see corruption as a corollary of politics and related only to politics. This line of thinking allows large numbers of the “anti-politics” citizens to think that politics needs to be minimised, reformed and/or sanitised. Indeed, the politics of substantial sections of middle classes is marked by contempt towards politics itself. It is not clear if the AAP has acquired supporters beyond this group or whether it has convinced this group of the necessity of and messiness of politics.
The main targets of attack are elected representatives, party officials and public office holders. In this sense, the pre-party agitation run by the IAC and the tendencies prevalent in the AAP are close to the description of being “anti-political – establishment” though they also harbour more forthright anti-politics sentiments. Even the write-up by Anand Kumar expresses the anti-political-establishment stance of the party very clearly.
Therefore, in spite of the difficulties regarding its practice and position, we must also ask another question: what role may the AAP play in the politics of the country in the near future? This question becomes valid also on account of the unprecedented media attention the party has received; its ability to either produce mass protests (in select cities) or its ability to ride piggyback on “flash mobs” and the possibility that it might gatecrash at least in biparty situations where reliable third options are not emerging.
In the last four years, the Congress and the UPA have been discredited; but the real failure has been that of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It has singly failed as an opposition party. This has left a vacuum both at the all-India level and also in states where the BJP is the main contender apart from the Congress. Besides, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) too has not got its act together. It experienced defeat in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and has also been unable to mobilise voters in other states where it could have expanded. Given this overall inability of the existing parties to produce substantial reconfiguration, new and “mediatised” parties like the AAP would certainly think that they have a good chance to make their presence felt.
‘Spoilers’
As it so often happens in the Indian context, and particularly against the backdrop of diffuse multiparty competition at the all-India level, new parties end up being “spoilers” for one of the established players – and that too only in some states or places. There is no clarity about the threshold of relevance in the contemporary party framework in India. In comparative literature, 3% of seats is seen by one study as the threshold. For a multiparty competition with a large legislature, more than 17 or 18 seats may be a tall order. Even if we settle for 3% of the required strength as necessary for government (majority) formation, that amounts to five seats. Besides the Congress and BJP, in the present Lok Sabha, only the following eight parties have a strength of five or more: Trinamool, DMK, JD(U), Shiv Sena, RLD, CPM, SP and BSP. Then, there are 20 parties with three or less than three members in the House. The crucial issue is whether with three or five members a party would be in a position to force a certain policy or programme unless the party is necessary for government formation and is also willing to participate in the ruling coalition.
From the high reformist and moral language the AAP speaks, it is difficult to think of the party getting involved in government formation – even if we assume that it wins a couple of seats to the Lok Sabha or a few seats to a state legislature. Thus, crossing the threshold (even at the state level) might be tough and having crossed it, becoming relevant to policymaking and/or government formation is even more unlikely.
Against this backdrop, the main asset of the AAP will be its image as a party that is ready to take on the “establishment”. In more or less stable biparty/bipolar competition, third or minor parties “serve as vehicles channelling political discontent” because the third/minor parties tend to represent and capitalise upon prevailing “anti-partyism”. Existing literature suggests that those citizens who are fed up with parties in general tend to abstain from voting whereas those who are angry/upset with major parties tend to turn to new/third parties.
With its specific targeting of the main opposition and the ruling party, the AAP in its short life so far seems to have sharpened a sense of “specific anti-partyism” (sentiments against the main parties), it is also possible that it has converted some general anti-partyism (an overall anti-party sentiment) into the specific version of anti-partyism. The crucial question for AAP is twofold – what space would it have in non-bipolar situations? And, does it have the capacity to place itself in a position to exploit the specific anti-partyism against the Congress and BJP beyond a few cities? But more than these questions of realpolitik, the question would be what kind of democracy it wants to build and what kind of political sensibilities it wants to tap.
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