An experiment in Delhi

The city state of Delhi is one of the richest and best-governed states of India. Simply put, Delhi is not India. Even though too many of Delhi’s responsibilities are held by the central government, such as policing, you would have to be lying if you did not give credit to Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit who has won three successive elections. Next week, the veteran Congress woman is giving it a fourth try.

While every voter realises that central and state elections are different, Sheila Dikshit faces an electorate that is sick and angry because of her party’s performance at the centre. With Sheila Dikshit herself, there is a sense of boredom. She has aged and doesn’t always say the right things, certainly not when the Congress party, at every level, embarrassed the people of Delhi with the way it organised the 2010 Commonwealth games. The incredible loot of that event was an international embarrassment for India and some of the blame has also gone to Dikshit’s table. The way anti-corruption and anti-rape protests in Delhi have been dealt with by the central government, hasn’t helped Sheila either.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in Delhi, is in such a bad way that it has been waiting for years for Sheila to falter and for the public to vote the BJP into power in exasperation. The BJP in Delhi, or for that matter at the centre, rarely behaves like an opposition party. It just knows its core base of the trading community is intact and it just hopes a few more upper caste voters will vote for it. A BJP leader’s son told me that he told his dad even he won’t vote for the BJP in Delhi. The BJP’s men just can’t compete with Sheila and with the Congress’s popularity

The BJP might do well in this election in Delhi, and we could even have said it could win, but for a new X factor called the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The AAP is the electoral avatar of the 2011 anti-corruption movement. Led by Arvind Kejriwal, the AAP is giving sleepless nights to both the Congress and the BJP. Here is a political party just over a year old and everyone is asking how many seats it will win, and more importantly, in how many seats will it ‘cut’ votes of the leading candidate and alter the result. Ah, the excitement of the first-past-the-post electoral system!

There are many reasons why the AAP deserves a chance, the best of which for me is that they have been behaving like an opposition party. They have smartly identified the issues that matter to people in today’s Delhi — the high prices of electricity thanks to profiteering by private power distribution companies, regular supply of water, the unbelievably exorbitant fees that Delhi’s schools charge, and so on. You could say their idea of a ‘commando force’ to protect women sounds silly and unviable, but their idea of ‘mohalla sabhas’, or neighbourhood self-governance councils, sounds great.

The AAP promises to replace Delhi’s toothless anti-corruption ombudsmen with a strong Lokpal. What makes me riot for the AAP is also the undue and unfair opposition that the Lokpal movement of 2011 received from my left-liberal friends. Everything they said about that popular movement came out to be untrue. The intellectuals criticised that movement for using agitation rather than electoral politics to achieve their goal. When the movement turned into a party, the intellectuals still had a problem. They criticised it for an ‘authoritarian’ Kejriwal using a ‘fascist’ Anna Hazare as a puppet. When Kejriwal got rid of the puppet, they had a problem with that too. It is for all to see that the AAP is a far more democratic party than the BJP or the Congress.

The intellectuals said that the Lokpal movement was a foil for the BJP but when it became the AAP, the right-wingers went from supporting to opposing it overnight. The dirty tricks departments of both the BJP and the Congress are out to discredit Kejriwal, which goes to show he must be doing something right. The critics said he won’t win a single seat; the same critics are today asking whether the AAP will win more than 10 of 72 seats in the Delhi assembly. Even one seat would be a great achievement for a party that new — and that one seat could be the New Delhi constituency where Kejriwal is taking on the formidable Sheila Dikshit herself.

The left-liberal-radicals hate Kejriwal because he ‘looks’ middle class and for lefties, middle class has to be the RSS. Leftists want politicians to be pure Oxbridge like Salman Khurshid or good subalterns like Mayawati. How dare Arvind Kejriwal engage with the middle class voter?

Published in The Express Tribune, November 29^th, 2013.

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