Monday, April 14, 2014

AAP – The party is not revolutionary not even a new experiment.

As an active social worker (a swayamsevak) and a social observer for more than half of my life now, I have been part of election campaigns before.  My views here are not the views of a political commentator / an academic, but it’s the view of a normal social worker from the normal middle class background who has experience in working in the streets.
After the Delhi elections, some of my friends from Bharat, were surprised with of AAP winning so many seats and were wondering whether it’s a beginning of a new type of Indian politics. My humble response to them was the path taken by AAP is nothing new (or revolutionary) and it will not work in the long term, even if AAP managed to form a government in Delhi. (Nothing has changed in the last few months that will force me to change the above view.  AAP is progressing ! exactly as i anticipated. )

The following reasons for making the above statement.

1.       Political change will not bring about social reform.
Corruption is not a problem only at the government level.  It has pervaded all walks of national life.  Unfortunately the common man is also corrupt.  There was a similar view resonated in a Tamil weekly magazine by a retired IAS officer, who said people who are running AAP does not know how corrupt and selfish the common man has become now-a-days.  
Let me give a small example to drive home this point. Many of us would have stood in a queue in railway stations for getting tickets, have we not seen people who walk to the front of the  line asking people in the front of the line to get tickets for them as they don’t want to stand in the queue.  These are common people too. I am proud to say that I have fought with some of them in railway stations for their unfair selfish behaviour; unfortunately there is large number of them.   The point that I am trying to make here is ‘common man’ is not a qualification.
Coming from political family is not a qualification. Similarly being a common man is not a qualification for working for society.  Doing work for the society means we need people with some basic qualities (Love for the our samaj - i.e community, integrity in Character, a heart that can cry for others, a humble head, good team building skills and most importantly the ability to put organization above oneself - all the time).  People with those attributes don’t jump from sky and they are made in our neighborhoods and they rise up to become our leaders. The social movements that the produce such leaders bring about social change and not just a mere change in government. 

2.       Political change without adequate social reform will not be sustainable even if the political change happens.

We the people of Tamil Nadu over throw the Congress party in 1967. Mr Karunanidhi as per his own biography ( Nenjukku Nedhi – in Tamil meaning Justice for the heart) started his public life without another pair of cloths to change.  (Unlike Mr Arvind  Kejriwal whose family holidays in Singapore). Mr Karunanidhi started the political carrier from such humble background and we the people of Tamil Nadu elected such a common man and his party  to power (many of them were college students when winning elections).
Today his family(s) J  is one of the richest families in Asia or even may be in the world. (The additional s family is not a mistake as Mr Karunanidhi is known to be married 3 times with 2 wives still alive). After about 50 years of Dravidian party rule, Tamil Nadu is one of the backward states today (when compared to Gujarat) with poor roads, poor water supply and poor state of electricity supply just like many other part of Bharat.
Something similar happened in Assam. The students there decided to replace the government and succeeded (Assam Gana Parishad - AGP in short). The AGP contested the State Assembly elections held in December 1985 and swept the polls by winning 67 of the 126 seats apart from capturing seven of the 14 Lok Sabha (Parliament) seats, and formed the Government of Assam.  Unfortunately it did not result in any major development of the state of Assam nor did the infiltration from Bangladeshis into Assam stopped (one of the key points that AGP fought for – i.e. to end Bangladeshi Muslim infiltration)



3.   Particularly in the case of AAP that was born out of the India against Corruption movement
·        Most of the people who were part of the Anti corruption movement are not supporting AAP. (People like Sri Anna Hazare, Sri Baba Ramdev and  Smt. Kiran Bedi )
Some of them are even against AAP. Smt Kiran Bedi has openly come forwarded and conveyed her support for Sri Narendra Modi in the National election.
·        AAP missed the golden opportunity: They were given chance to form the Delhi government but resigned on their own in less than 2 months.
·         A party with only a negative campaign that every other political party is bad will be become another bad political party. I can already see it in their behaviour
o   their anti-India Statements on Kashmir,
o   Muslim appeasement  by appealing to their community separately asking them to vote from them
o     Only Muslim AAP candidates contesting  in Muslim majority constituencies. (i.e. they are also playing the communal card like Congress)


·        AAP is another communist party with a new name. This is no secret about it and you can see it evidently in their calls to ask Maoists to join their party, we have communists in different flavours CPI (alphabets A to Z in brackets). Since there is a communist party almost on every capital letter after CPI, (instead of trying out CPI with lower case alphabet extensions) they might have wanted to try out a new name.  As Sri Subramanian Swamy quoted ‘AAP will become a text book study for many of our communist comrades’ on how to launch a communist party into main stream politics.

·         AAP- A party hyped by the media.  Lot of journalists have been part of the AAP (typically from the English press- many of them left  leaning). Some of them have been rewarded with seats in the National elections.  They can write whatever they want in their own respective media spear of influence  but winning elections needs different set of skills.

·         Most importantly, the following is the demography the supports AAP:
o   Smaller section of the educated middle class that still carry the ‘secular’ luggage.      These ‘secular luggage’ carriers are afraid to support BJP due to the so-called ‘unsecular’ stigma associated with it. (I used to carry that luggage too, then I decided to drop it and move on after understanding the social fabric of the nation –i.e.  India is secular only because it’s a Hindu nation. )
o     Minorities – who have been always tactical voters- generally voting for alternatives to BJP. Especially for Muslims  -supporting AAP willl makes them appear less communal! than Muslims supporting Akbaruddin Owaisi [from All India Majlis-e Ittihad al-Muslimin party].   Please don't feel bad, if you can’t pronounce that party name  J

The above constituents will not dent the BJP vote share, what you will see in the election results in 2014  is the erosion of vote share of congress and the ‘secular’ members of the ‘imaginary’ third front.

This will be the last election that AAP will be talked about in this large scale. In the next election they will be part of the long list of losers.