One of the more difficult things to do in any election since 2014 is to foreground electoral issues related to what they are supposed to be actually about — the ability of the contending party to govern effectively. It has been relatively less cumbersome for opposing parties to make a mark in States where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has to stand on its record, but far more difficult for parties that are already in power to retain them. Only the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (in States where the BJP is weak) have managed to retain power and even these parties, barring the TMC, had shied away from taking a strong oppositional position to the BJP.
Poll strategies
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has been a bugbear of the BJP, not only retained power winning 62 of the 70 seats in the Delhi Assembly election, but also managed to nearly emulate its strong performance in 2015 when it won 67 seats. This is a credit not only to its governance record but also its ability to turn the election into a referendum on its tenure. The BJP’s strongest point in recent elections has been to set the terrain of political discourse in the run-up to the polls and force its opponent to contest on those grounds. Aiding this strategy has been the BJP’s machine that provides it an organisational superiority which is buttressed by financial power unmatched by other parties.
The run-up to the Delhi election featured a no-holds barred campaign by the BJP that sought to foreground the cultural jingoist narrative of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), the dilution of Article 370, and the demonisation of the protests against the CAA and the National Register of Citizens embodied in the Shaheen Bagh sit-in. The campaign strategy was based on a calculus that had worked before. The BJP had, only in May 2019, managed to win 56.6% of the votes in Delhi, harping on the government’s decisive action following the Pulwama terror attacks. In recent Assembly elections, the deft use of Backward Class politics had been combined with the virulent use of the “Hindutva” card and this had more often than not, worked in the BJP’s favour. AAP, on the other hand, had tried to position itself as a party that was evasive or malleable with respect to ideology. Delhi Chief Minister and AAP founder Arvind Kejriwal has indeed articulated the importance of taking on the politics of hatred and communal differentiation, but his party’s emphasis has largely been on his government’s record on delivering basic services to an urban electorate without recourse to identitarian biases. While doing so, AAP did not seek to actively engage with the BJP’s focal issues such as the CAA/NRC and the nature of the protests against this amendment. Meanwhile the desperate and reactive attempt by the BJP to resort to calumny against AAP’s leadership only backfired.
In trying to set the discourse during the elections to be based on its governance record, AAP provided the Delhi voter a clear choice — would they endorse the steps taken by the regime or would they judge it in terms set by the BJP and its communal discourse? This was a pivotal achievement by the AAP and sets the party’s victory as one achieved in much more difficult circumstances compared to its triumph in 2015 or its strong foray into electoral politics in 2013, graduating from a civil society led movement against corruption.
Party trump cards
In 2015, AAP had managed to sway the Delhi electorate and build a multi-class coalitional support base — of the urban poor and the middle class with its promises of delivering on a corruption and patronage free governance that would reduce costs of basic services such as water supply and electricity.
In 2020, it managed to retain the support of this coalition through actual delivery, by devoting a significant portion of its budget allocations to education, health, water supply and sanitation. The government’s emphasis in bringing particular greater equity in primary education through the ramping up of infrastructure and better learning outcomes in government schools, bringing basic primary health care to colonies where the urban poor lived in the form of “mohalla clinics” and measures for affordable and safe public transport paid great dividends. This can indeed be a model for other urban centres in the country, provided the administration in these cities are empowered to allocate resources that would address glaring needs for the cities.
Yet, the lack of an ideological core or even an attempt to take positions on various national and international issues has disabled the party’s ambition to grow beyond the metropolitan borders of India’s National Capital Territory region and which has resulted in its decline in the only State where it made a mark beyond Delhi — in Punjab. The party started as a coalition of technocrats/managers who promised good governance and social movement-oriented ideologues who sought to resuscitate a flailing social democratic space in the Indian polity. But the split in 2015, that led to activists like Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan leaving the party, reduced it only to the former who had to make the best of the limited space in government in the Union Territory in order to survive. To the credit of Mr. Kejriwal and his colleagues, their governance has helped them retain public support within Delhi, but there is still time for the party to evolve if it needs to expand beyond the capital region and capture the imagination of other progressive and liberal minded people in the rest of the country.
srinivasan.vr@thehindu.co.in
