Now, as the election fever is over with the people’s verdict in favour of the BJP, the AAP leadership should become practical and step out of the ivory tower
Just a year back, no one would have imagined Delhi without Sheila Dikshit, but the harbinger of continuity and progress who took this historical city into the league of world’s most modern cities could not keep tabs on fast political transition which India in general and Delhi in particular experienced during the last few years.
Sheila Dikshit is not at all in the firmament of Delhi politics despite so much political activity and is referred to only as a former Chief Minister. This Goliath of Delhi politics was vanquished by the David — Arvind Kejriwal and his newborn political party, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The mesmerising performance of the AAP also brought some challenges for the greenhorn. The biggest challenge was how to re-enact this performance at the national level. To extract maximum political mileage, the fledgling party undertook a Herculean task of forming a minority government with the help of the grand old party, the Congress, to prove that they will not shy away from owning up the responsibility to provide a government in the national Capital as the BJP did citing high moral ground. The goodwill the AAP generated by forming the Delhi Government, despite pre-poll vows of neither accepting nor extending support, soon dissipated due to some missteps, including the “self-sacrifice” of the party’s government in Delhi.
The AAP jumped into the national election arena even without assessing the ground realities. The wisdom failed to prevail over euphoria and the subsequent lacklustre performance gave courage to a section within the party to say that the so-called sacrifice was a blunder, a trick which did not yield the desired results.
Armed with the time-tested sharp-edged weapon of corruption, 28 seats in Delhi Assembly, and 49 days of governance in its kitty, the unprepared AAP joined the big fight and fielded more candidates than the Congress or the BJP did. The decision was a major miscalculation and the party was just swept away by the superficial emotions of the party cadre. But, now, with the people’s verdict giving just a handful seats to the AAP, there is bound to be some introspection among party leaders and workers.
AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal has already admitted that demitting the Chief Minister office in haste was a mistake. But there are people who think otherwise. They argue that given the situation at that point in time leaving Delhi without a government was no big deal. It was neither disastrous nor suicidal with lok Sabha elections just three months away as no shrewd politician would like to run a government with the support of a party that was facing the wrath of the common man due to plethora of scams and steep inflation.
However, the major bloomer the AAP committed was its decision to field more than 400 candidates in the 16th lok Sabha elections. The decision to leave the government would have produced fructuous results had the party focused on a fewer number of seats and restricted itself to contesting 50 to 70 winnable constituencies. Simultaneously, the AAP should have assessed its resources, both financial and manpower. While fighting in Delhi, the party had abundant financial resources and volunteers from all parts of the country. But when it fought elections across the country it was bound to feel the pinch of shortage of volunteers and, of course, funds.
In this lok Sabha election, all the volunteers were either in their respective constituencies working for local AAP candidates or they wanted to be seen in Varanasi, the ultimate battleground for Arvind Kejriwal. Another big roadblock was that the majority of the people who joined the party after its success in the Delhi Assembly election were basically just ticket aspirants. Once they were denied a party ticket, they started silent campaign against the AAP and thus ended up producing too many conflicting voices and creating confusion. Moreover, the ticket distribution itself was flawed; for instance, Shazia Ilmi was pitted against General VK Singh in Ghaziabad though she was interested in contesting from Delhi. The party think-tank miserably failed to assess the mood of the people before taking a decision to contest on so many seats, because after assuming power in Delhi AAP’s slate was no longer so clean as it was before the Delhi elections. Kejriwal was greeted with all kinds of slogans from “incapable”, “liar”, to “bhagora”, and in days to come, the AAP and its leadership have to bear with it.
Nevertheless, the AAP is a new party and is bound to learn from its blunders. Now, as the election fever is over with the people’s verdict in favour of the BJP, AAP leadership should present itself as a humble party if it wants to remain in politics for long because hollow promises can pull the wool over voters’ eyes only once or twice.
(The writer is a senior journalist and an avid follower of Delhi politics)