Opinion The AAPostate

By pitting Bedi against Kejriwal, both products of the Anna movement, the BJP has attempted to make a virtue out of a necessity. To salt the AAP’s wounds, the BJP also inducted Shazia Ilmi, thus addressing the “anti-minority” charge. As India’s first woman police officer, who reformed hardened criminals of Tihar jail, Bedi’s administrative record competes with Kejriwal’s. As a woman leader, she is also likely to gain from the recent surge in women voters across the country. Former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit gained from such a surge three times in the past.

Some prominent women leaders have already quit the AAP — Ilmi and Madhu Bhaduri, for instance. This raises serious questions about the internal patriarchy of the AAP’s leadership. It is important to recall that Bhaduri, a former diplomat, left the AAP in 2013, alleging mistreatment of women in the party. “The party has the mentality of a khap panchayat. There is no space for women. If the other women leaders have any self-respect, they will quit too,” Bhaduri reportedly said. With Bedi’s induction, the BJP has begun to co-opt the AAP’s agenda, just as its Swachh Bharat campaign swallowed the AAP’s election symbol, the broom.

Seething with fierce anti-incumbency, Delhi went to the polls in 2013. That election saw a critical realignment: a decisive, dramatic, durable shift of voters away from traditional political parties. But much more importantly, the roots of the 2013 election result lay in the popular Anna movement. As an anti-Congress movement, the Delhi polls were a powerful precursor to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

This isn’t new in Indian politics. The best historical parallel to this potent link between a popular anti-establishment, anti-Congress movement and a subsequent realigning election in India was the anti-Emergency movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan. Beginning as the Nav Nirman agitations in the Congress-ruled states of Gujarat and Bihar, the JP movement became the beacon for the watershed 1977 Lok Sabha elections. Both the JP and the Anna movements began essentially as anti-corruption crusades against Congress incumbents. The entire political leadership in Bihar — across the ideological spectrum, whether it is Lalu Prasad of the RJD, Nitish Kumar of the JD(U), Ram Vilas Paswan of the LJP or Sushil Modi of the BJP — is a product of the JP movement. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley also belongs to the same cohort.

Fast forward to 2013. The new cohort born out of the Anna agitation — Kejriwal, Bedi, Ilmi and others — are products of a similar movement-linked critical election. That some of them are with the BJP today is not surprising since they came of age attacking the Congress. That they left the AAP could also be seen as an indictment of Kejriwal’s ability to be the glue of what he called a “Shivji ki baraat”.

What distinguishes today’s politics from that of 1977, however, is the constant public glare. The larger-than-life TV cameras often dazzle politically astute leaders, sometimes blinding them. But what appears appealing on camera could be suicidal in politics. Resigning on camera may make you appear to be a martyr but could prove costly in reality. The sight of a CM sleeping on a cold street in winter may be great TV, but as the AAP has realised, it is political harakiri. Such moves alienated the middle class as much as they gave the party an anarchist reputation. Any attempt to cut formidable opponents to size in front of TV cameras could boomerang when rivals hit back.
Kejriwal’s premature resignation in 2014 was the AAP’s first serious political blunder. Last week’s ill-timed vituperative attack on the BJP state leadership, resulting in the AAP being forced to contest against its own B team, could be the second.

With Bedi as the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate, could the tide of the campaign have turned against the AAP? Kejriwal has outstanding leadership qualities — he is a moral crusader, charismatic, articulate, knowledgeable and an organic leader of the masses. Yet, could a minor character flaw, underscored in his latest attack on the BJP state leadership — he is impulsive, attempts to punch above his weight and habitually fires his most valuable weapon before time — prove to be disproportionately injurious?

An important lesson of the historic parallel between 1977 and 2013-2014 is that the most formidable rival of the Congress, the BJP (the erstwhile Bharatiya Jana Sangh), gained directly on both occasions. In 1977, the Jana Sangh participated in the JP movement and, as a result, became part of the Janata Party government. In 2014, the BJP appropriated the agenda of the Anna movement. To claim, as Kejriwal does, that the Congress and the BJP are one and the same is not just empty rhetoric but also politically naive. Logically, an attack on the Congress strengthens the BJP and vice versa. In 2015, the BJP leadership, by inducting the B team of the AAP, has once more attempted to checkmate Kejriwal.

Today, the BJP has cast the 2015 assembly polls in Delhi as an anti-AAP election. By co-opting the AAP’s agenda and leaders, the BJP has swung leftward from its earlier rightwing position. The Congress, too, has sharpened its attack on the AAP as the U-turn, 49 day-government party, also penetrating leftwards into the AAP’s territory. In a three-cornered contest, sandwiched between two traditional rivals, the AAP would need to grab the median voter, the pivotal position from which the Congress has gained in the past. In an urban environment, even with largely poor voters, the median position is the winning position. More importantly, Kejriwal would need to come up with an alternative strategy to counter Bedi’s morally upright, tough administrator image without attacking her negatively. Any attempt by the AAP now to move towards an extreme-left position, or act in an “anarchic” manner, would be ill-judged. The year 2015 could well decide the future of India’s most powerful political startup.

The writer is a senior journalist
express@expressinida.com