Kejriwal, or brick in the wall?

With the announcement that the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Arvind Kejriwal will contest the forthcoming elections against Sheila Dikshit, the temptation to consider the electoral battle a game-changing one, a turning point for India’s fractured democracy, will be hard to resist. No one else has charged political leaders with graft in quite the way Kejriwal has. The campaign has not been consistent, it has focused on key figures from the ruling party and the Opposition, sporadically stinging like a bee. By those fitful exposures, the crusader offered indications of where he and AAP were headed.

Heading for elections

The first sign came in a sort of rupture with Anna Hazare over contesting elections. That rupture reflected a basic shift from the Lokpal Bill as the pivot of the earlier anti-corruption drive, to a focus on corrupt personalities. It was inevitable; if AAP had to jump into the electoral fray it could up its chances for gains by letting go the Lokpal Bill, an abstract notion for most Indians, for more dramatic effects.

The language at the convention where Kejriwal’s name was announced expressed this concern with personalities, repeatedly. Dikshit was identified as the “symbol of corruption” and Kejriwal would hound her wherever she opted to stand from; the BJP was incapable of defeating her, the match had been ‘fixed’, they would hand over Delhi to the Congress and only AAP could topple that “symbol” of the “current political system”, in the words of Prashant Bhushan.

The use of the word “symbol” will reverberate throughout AAP’s election campaign. In the discourse of the crusader, the symbol is the fact, and to topple that symbol, as AAP is confident of doing through the agency of Kejriwal’s personality, is to obliterate the reality.

In the world of electoral politics that AAP has entered with its eyes wide open, Kejriwal is hoping to play the anti-incumbent card; given the rage and fury that rocked Delhi after the brutal assaults on women and the indifference of the law enforcement, the callousness of both the ruling party and the Opposition unable or perhaps fearful of plumbing the depths of that rage, Kejriwal might have just got himself a winning formula.

It is also conceivable that armed with enough mud to fling at state-level politicians from both major parties, AAP candidates will win seats: it is equally possible that they may not. At the convention, Kejriwal was perhaps too hasty in sneering at the BJP. In parliamentary politics and particularly at the present juncture when coalition politics sets its own rules for survival, discretion should be the better part of valour.

What can AAP do?

So AAP may win some seats by charging into both the Congress and the BJP. But what would the voters have gained apart from new faces promising change? Will India breathe easier in the knowledge that its political system is less corrupt, now that some rotten eggs in an otherwise acceptable system have been removed?

That would depend on what AAP’s candidates have to offer. Right now they are far too preoccupied with “symbols” of perceived iniquity. But symbols operate and acquire meaning in an enabling or disabling environment; and a larger cleansing act has to tackle that environment.

Both, the BJP and its allies and the UPA transmit a common ideology. It’s not just the neo-liberal discourse, naked or dressed-up capitalism, that is at work in economic life, but the structures of consciousness that system generates to perpetuate itself --- the codes by which we determine social aspirations and goals that frame the environment and institutions with which we live and govern ourselves.

Ballot paper, no power

What India’s Parliamentary democracy provides the vast number of Indians is a set of unattainable goals and slips of paper to shove into the ballot box. That symbol of democracy is for most Indians the only democracy they know, the crowning moment of which is a paid-for trip to the polling station once in a while.

Missing from Kejriwal’s discourse is a picture of that ideological system of acquisitive power and wealth, its empty symbols of democracy and its self-perpetuating metaphors that have insinuated themselves into our daily lives as codes of behaviour — in short, the system that legitimises misappropriation of public resources for the benefit of a few.

Lack of vision

What is missing in the anti-corruption drive, Anna Hazare’s included — who correctly wishes to reassert the Jan Lokpal Bill but wrongly through a threatened fast — is a combative alternative, not to the personalities that are corrupt but to the environment and its ideological underpinnings that socialise corruption.

Without that enabling counterpoint, responses to corruption remain gestures, some powerful (the early support for Anna Hazare), others farcical — resignations pending inquiry being the latest and easiest option.

Without a counter-intuitive agenda made socially acceptable through mobilisation, governments will not be pressurised enough to create the kind of institutions that can either mitigate or punish corruption. It is not Hazare’s faltering crusade but the lack of a public consciousness that has allowed the Lokpal Bill to remain a damp squib.

In the absence of a counter-intuitive ideology, adopted by a people who care for a regenerative and not acquisitive present --- as Indians put together during the freedom struggle --- AAP’s campaigns at the general elections may end up as no more than personality contests glamorised by the electronic and digital media.

That would be a pity. Fledgling as it may be, no other party holds such a promise of political re-invention. Unburdened by old sectarian prejudices or past glories, AAP tapped into the moral indignation of the urban middle-class. But if it does not build its own discourse for systemic change by pointing to the roots of corruption located in a system of wealth generation or individual-utility maximisation, it may end up as another coalition partner at best or redundant at worst. Just another brick in the wall.

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