After the financial crisis of 2008, anger against the political establishment mounted across the globe. Protest movements, often crossing into civil disobedience, arose in several nations, and revolutions broke out in some. Despite the turmoil of the past seven years, it is striking how few new formations have gained power anywhere.
Entry barriers to political parties are clearly very high anywhere in the world. The Aam Aadmi Party’s decisive, indeed flabbergasting, victory in the recent Delhi poll and Alexis Tsipras’s victory in Greece are notable exceptions to the trend of electorates rewarding political establishments they profess to hate.
In 2013, Arvind Kejriwal channelled the public anger that had fuelled Anna Hazare’s movement. In 2015, he realised that the general election of 2014 had altered the national mood. It was too late now to focus on the failures of the past regime, and too early to concentrate on the missteps of the new one. AAP took a more positive line in the just-concluded Delhi state election, highlighting the changes it would bring about, outlined in a 70-point action plan.
The first thing apparent on reading the manifesto is its unoriginality. Its promises of free water, cheap electricity and good schooling seem like old hat, and although its insistence on public investment, state jobs, and subsidies is unusual in our time, there is little, aside from the rejection of foreign direct investment in retail, that might not conceivably find place in a manifesto of the Indian National Congress. AAP’s credo is slightly to the left of the current INC’s position, and would fit precisely with the Congress philosophy in, say, Jawaharlal Nehru’s time.
Nehru is now an established hate figure for large sections of affluent Indians. In keeping with this attitude, AAP’s Nehruvian manifesto has been dismissed as a dinosaur in the mainstream media. It is understandable why this is the case. The Nehruvian dream gradually collapsed in the face of the failure efficiently to implement its basic promises.
The state came to be viewed less as an enabler of rights and provider of basic necessities than an oppressive force disallowing citizens their due. Once the gap between what parties promised and what they delivered became cavernously wide, the entire rhetoric of state-driven development came to sound misguided and hypocritical. In response, politicians and the intelligentsia looked to the private sector to deliver jobs, growth and development.
The centre-right BJP was particularly enthusiastic about the change in focus, while the centre-left Congress retained some connection with its Nehruvian past through programmes like NREGA. The problem with the Congress was how different it looked from the way it sounded: it had shifted steadily from the insurgent party of the Independence struggle to a deeply corrupt fiefdom. By the time Rahul Gandhi was elevated to the front rank, and proved himself entirely unworthy of that position, it was inconceivable that any individual might join the Indian National Congress out of a sense of idealism.
AAP has rekindled that spirit of idealism, which once animated the Congress of Gandhi and Nehru, as well as its spirit of inclusiveness. The party’s unambiguous dismissal of the Shahi Imam’s endorsement, for instance, demonstrated that Indian secularism need not involve pandering to religious conservatives of every stripe.
AAP now faces the challenge of demonstrating that the Indian state can treat ordinary citizens with dignity and provide them with basic modern necessities: clean water, enough to eat, rudimentary healthcare, a reasonable education, an assured supply of electricity, and a sense of security. It isn’t too much to ask, and is achievable without bankrupting the state exchequer. If a nation cannot do this much after 70 years as an independent democracy, it ought to be reclassified as a failed republic.
It feels at the moment like a reset button has been pressed on Indian democracy. Perhaps, in time, the feeling will come to seem wrong-headed, the significance of AAP’s victory blown out of all proportion. Perhaps the party will fail to tame the wilderness that is India’s bureaucracy, and its members feel tempted by the perquisites they now somewhat ostentatiously abjure. Perhaps Arvind Kejriwal will end up a politician like other politicians. It’s happened before to idealists as seemingly incorruptible as he.
This moment, though, is filled with rare hope. If the Delhi experiment succeeds, it could spread easily to the rest of the country. AAP could conceivably supplant the Congress as the largest centre-left, secular formation in the country, without the dead weight of dynasty holding it back.
The Greece’s new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s used a Leonard Cohen song at his rallies that carried the refrain, “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” AAP has taken Delhi as comprehensively as possible. With luck, it will be the party’s first step rather than its last.
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