Is the rise of AAP bad news for BJP?

BJP’s presence in major states, its superior organisational capacity should be able to convert those attracted to Modi

There are two ways of looking at this and it isn’t clear which one will prevail in April-May 2014’s general election. The first is to see the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as a party of anger that collects votes against the establishment and cuts into the votes of the opposition. The establishment is the Congress and the votes taken away are those of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This is what happened in Delhi, where the AAP dethroned the Congress and ate into enough of the BJP’s votes to deny it victory.

It is important to note here that the BJP in Delhi actually won a plurality of both the votes and the seats, though it could not win a majority.

But should this pattern repeat across India’s large and midsized cities, it is possible that the BJP will be denied votes nationally in the same manner as it was in Delhi.



The other way of looking at it is to see the underlying sentiment that has propelled the rise of the AAP. It is quite remarkable what the party has achieved, which is the first victory by a party completely independent of a caste base, in north India.

What were the issues on which it won votes? It is thought that there were such things as corruption in public life and inefficient government. Let us assume this is the case, even though there are other views on this. For instance, the Union Minister for Agriculture, Sharad Pawar, thinks that the AAP’s supporters were also those who voted in favour of corruption (by responding to promises of ‘regularising’ their illegal colonies) and undermining the state’s efficiency and finances (by responding to promises of free power and free water).

It is difficult to accept, certainly for those outside Delhi, that the AAP is seen by most Indians as some sort of silver bullet to kill corruption and slipshod governance with. The BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, is the man who attracts much and probably most of these votes. The AAP wants its voters to see him in the same way as the Congress and they keep saying that the Congress and the BJP are ‘two sides of the same coin’. However, that’s not how it was seen in Delhi where the BJP’s vote bank held over what had been secured in the last election, dropping just under two per cent. It is the anti-Congress votes the party was expecting that were taken away from it.

Is the AAP placed to take those away in other places as well? Delhi may not be a one-off for the AAP, but it does not have the time to get its act together on hundreds of Lok Sabha seats across two and a half dozen states.

Its great lessons in Delhi may well be replicable, especially those for fundraising and selecting candidates. But putting out a national campaign will need more resources and certainly more time than this brave little party has.

The other thing is: how many seats does it need to cheat the BJP of a win? Or how much of the vote does it need to draw away to produce the same result even without winning many seats? The Congress won just under 120 million votes in 2009, while the BJP won 78.4 million votes. That was about half the total vote (Congress got over 28 per cent and the BJP over 18 per cent). Both parties, in particular the BJP, are missing from some major states, such as Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. To put this in perspective, the AAP got 2.5 million votes in the Delhi elections. This is admirable and — as I have accepted — quite unprecedented, but it also shows how gigantic the task is.

My view is that the BJP’s presence in major states and its superior organisational capacity should be able to easily convert those attracted to the siren call of Modi. And that the AAP will trouble the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections much less than it did in Delhi.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 12^th, 2014.

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