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.
