RANDOM ACCESS. The politics of urban angst

Back in December 2013 — this was shortly after the Delhi Assembly elections, the one the BJP almost, but not quite managed to win — former BJP president and Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari dubbed the Aam Aadmi Party’s politics as “rightwing Maoism”. Like the Maoists, Gadkari said, the AAP also wanted the “system to be dismantled”.

The Maoist allusion is understandable. For the BJP leader, a lifelong member of a disciplined, cadre-based organisation such as the RSS, the AAP’s brand of rambunctious individualism must have appeared pretty much like Maoist anarchy.

But the right wing bit is more puzzling. Why right wing? The AAP itself claims to be nothing of the kind. If anything, it lays claim to the Gandhian vision of swaraj — self rule. Its official vision document explicitly states that its goal is to decentralise politics — which is why it doesn’t have a central high command — and make elected representatives “directly accountable” to the people who voted for them. In Delhi, one of its key election promises is to pass a Swaraj Bill, which will devolve budgeting powers to local citizen groups.

All this is quite different from what the BJP, an avowedly right wing party, advocates. So one wonders what similarities or parallels Gadkari saw between the AAP’s socio-economic ideology and the BJP’s own philosophy.

Whatever it is that Gadkari saw, the ideologically hard core Left is also apparently spotting. Writing on the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) website, CPI (ML) polit bureau member PJ James thundered: “…it must be unequivocally be stated that, AAP having a clear-cut capitalist world outlook, the difference between it and other ruling class parties is only of degree and not of kind”.

James went on to dub the AAP as a “petty bourgeois party led by a heterogeneous admixture of yuppies of all hues composed of urban IT professionals, disgruntled bureaucrats, neo-Gandhians, NGO theorists, postmodern ideologues and self-professed socialists, all of them not having an anti-systemic political perspective or ideological leanings”.

The old AAP — the one which lost to the BJP’s brand of aspirational politics two times running (in the Assembly elections, and then the Lok Sabha rout) may conceivably be dubbed right wing, if nothing else, by the politics of its then support base. The urban middle-class, disenchanted with the pervasive corruption in politics and administration, flocked to the AAP as an alternative, not just because of its anti-corruption world view, but also because the AAP’s ideology largely matched its own.

This urban middle- (actually, middle middle and upper middle) class wanted actual jobs, not quotas and reservations and non-enforceable rights. It sought development on its doorsteps, not in the hinterland it had left behind. It was uneasy with the Congress’s hand-out politics (unable to morally square abject poverty with its own relative affluence, but resentful of being forced to carry the tax burden which funded this). Its bigger concerns were access to quality education — not just education — and affordable healthcare. All of these the AAP addressed.

But now, what AAP is actually saying and doing — and more importantly, the core political constituency that it seeks to address — belongs slap bang in the Left’s bailiwick. This, of course, is the new AAP, the AAP 2.0 which won by a landslide. This AAP is utilising something which the classic Left has been exploiting for years — the class divide.

Only, this divide is something the Left has failed to recognise the existence of. This is the divide between the urban underclass and the middle-class, leave alone the rich. This class has jobs — but jobs which pay enough only for a marginal existence in the underbelly of our cities. This class may not be actually living in a slum — but its living quarters are not slums only in the sense that they are not as squalid as the actual slums in our cities, but can by no stretch be called ‘decent’ habitation. This class has access to electricity — but finds the cost of privatised power unaffordable. This class has access to education — but the quality it is able to access is not enough for its children to break this class. This class can access healthcare — but one serious health setback to one member of the family is enough to bankrupt it. This class even has cheap smartphones — but cannot afford the cost of data.

It is this class which found in the AAP someone who was talking its language, addressing its issues, and promising solutions. Kejriwal relentlessly kept the focus on bijli-sadak-paani-naali (electricity, roads, water, sewerage). He promised to build 500 new schools in Delhi which this class sorely needs. He promised to build 20 colleges for Delhi kids, when most Delhi kids are unable to make the insane cut-offs in the national capital’s ‘no domicile quotas’ university. And he promised them something even better: state-guaranteed education loans, which will help their kids break the cycle forever.

In contrast, the BJP’s brand of aspiration, talk of ‘development’ in a ‘developed’ city, its brand of communal rhetoric, simply failed to resonate. As did the Congress’ brand of welfarism, and hand-out and rights-based social engineering.

The AAP has created a brand new school of politics, for a brand new India. The politics of urban angst.

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