Opinion The city-state
Whoever wins Delhi will have to contend with a rearranged political field and imagination.
Delhi enjoys a unique status as a city-state but Campaign 2015 may have announced the arrival, finally, of a politics of the city-state.
Whatever be the verdict of the polling today, this election, fought over gritty issues of urban governance as they play out in a space remade constantly by the migrant, has rearranged the political imagination of the city, in the city.
With the Aam Aadmi Party taking the lead and setting the tone, and the BJP and Congress reluctantly taking its cue, all the contenders talked of the delivery of civic amenities like bijli, sadak, paani, sewer and housing, and the corruption that takes a daily toll on citizens’ lives, especially the vast numbers who do not have the option of insulating themselves from government incapacities and failures to deliver services.
It isn’t that these issues have not become the stuff of elections before. But they have not been brought squarely centrestage quite in the way that they have been in this Delhi election.
In the process, some older certainties about India’s politics may stand dented or punctured. For a long time, cities have financed and subsidised the political focus on the “Real India” that was always thought to reside in its villages. Mainstream parties and politicians have largely had an extractive relationship with the city as they sought to, or pretended to, address the village, mostly through a politics that trades on fixed identities of caste, ethnicity, religion or region.
This has remained so, even as the increasing blurring of lines between the rural and urban, through technology and migration, has brought home the unsustainability of the old assumptions of a sharp urban-rural demarcation and disconnect. Now, the Delhi election, fought on a ground where identities are constantly mixing, heaving, jostling, aspiring and moving, has framed the possibilities of a new political idiom. Whether it wins the election or loses, the birth and rise of the AAP in Delhi has marked a departure from the way things used to be in the city.
Of course, a politics of the city will present its own challenges and conceits, blind spots and dead-ends. As the Delhi campaign also showed, it could well etch new divides to take the place of the old ones — based on class, not caste — and substitute catchy sops and high-visibility populism for enduring reform or systemic change. This election is just the beginning. The government that takes over after a campaign such as this one will be watched for the direction it gives, or fails to, to this new urban politics.
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