Last year in the run up to the Lok Sabha elections I had met Arvind Kejriwal in a modest flat in Varanasi where he was camping with his team of election managers.
I remember asking Kejriwal how AAP was managing elections all over India without any organisational structure in place. Kejriwal then told me that AAP was essentially an idea and a movement which would necessarily spread and take roots in an unstructured and unfettered manner. Any attempt to place the idea or movement in an organizational structure would be tantamount to limiting the freewheeling manner in which the very idea of AAP was catching people’s imagination.
PTI
Therefore candidates for the Lok Sabha elections literally chose themselves simply by telling Arvind Kejriwal that they believe in the idea of alternative politics and would fight with their own meager funds.
Indeed, Kejriwal proved prophetic when he said things would not be the same when you put a movement like AAP in a formal party organizational structure.
The ongoing power struggle and the unseemly spectacle of Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav getting thrown out of various decision making committees has badly dented the mystique and magic that had built around the idea of AAP over the past year and a half.
The manner in which the AAP rose to occupy national consciousness, faced an existential crisis post the Lok Sabha polls, and then rose from the ashes in the recently concluded Delhi polls was the stuff of fairly tales. AAP’s Delhi victory had political significance going beyond the Capital as the very scale of victory was generally seen as a huge rebuff to Modi’s style of politics.
After such a stunning finish we saw the most petty power struggle erupt within the AAP leadership, which now threatens to rapidly erode the moral high ground that the idea of AAP had taken. That AAP had indeed gained a moral high ground was privately admitted by its worst critics among the mainstream parties struggling with their own ossified organizational structures.
Though Kejriwal had an inkling that AAP would face the same kind of power struggles within as it gradually built its party organizational structure, he would not have thought things would implode so quickly. Since Kejriwal is still the face of the party, he could have shown rare generosity, in the face of admittedly grave anti-party activities by other senior leaders, to salvage the movement and avoided the unedifying sight of AAP’s dirty linen being washed in public.
After all, AAP’s victory in Delhi had raised hopes that the party would be able to spread its influence more systematically in some other Northern states. This prospect has suffered a serious blow.
AAP now looks like any other party with multiple power struggles happening within, where politics might seem like an end in itself.
So far AAP was being judged by a different yardstick as compared with the other mainstream parties. There was a certain innocence attached to AAP’s politics and the randomness of the movement which began three years ago . All that may change now.
When personality based power struggles happen within the BJP or Congress they are judged quite normally. Even the media takes it as a given. The ruthless manner in which Narendra Modi took charge of the BJP in 2013 and sidelined the old guard was in fact admired by political observers. No moral judgement was made.
Similarly, power struggle between various factions of the Congress is also seen as par for the course. But when similar power struggle happens among AAP leaders, eyebrows are raised because they claimed to be so different.
In statistical analysis we commonly use a term called normalisation.
Normalisation means coming closer to the mean behavior. AAP may go through a process of normalization in Indian politics. If this happens, then its uniqueness in regard to its capacity to build alternative politics will somewhat reduce. It is a bit early to pass full judgement on AAP as one will have to wait to see how it fulfils the various promises it has made.
If Kejriwal delivers on his basic public services to the poorest sections of the voters who have kept faith with AAP, he just might salvage the larger movement that AAP represented originally.
Politics is so full of possibilities. It is possible that after a passage of time, Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav may decide to work together again. This has happened in established parties like the Congress where top leaders like Pranab Mukherjee and P.Chidambaram had left the organisation and formed their own regional outfits. They came back to the Congress.
Such churn is quite natural in politics. Also, one should not jump to the conclusion that a split in AAP will permanently damage the prospect of alternative politics. AAP was a product of the massive churn in the form of an unprecedented anti-corruption movement and the intense national debate around the question whether sovereign resources are being used in public interest or are they lining private pockets.
In many ways, AAP’s intervention in politics has created some permanent change in the way politics is conducted. It has certainly put on notice the Congress and BJP which had assumed that institutions of governance could be run in a less-than-transparent and cosy manner if the established parties developed a common vested interest in doing so. Some of those assumptions have got shaken in the past 3 years and the emergence of the idea of AAP had something to do with it.
Mainstream parties may gloat over AAP's current predicament but privately they do seriously study whether the idea of AAP represents their own failures at some deeper level. So mainstream parties are also being forced to change their ways. These changes are here to stay no matter what happens to the fortunes of AAP as a political party.
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