The dream sours

In a letter addressed to party members, former journalist and Aam Aadmi party leader Ashutosh has described the ongoing tussle within the party, which ended over the weekend with the summary ouster of AAP co-founders Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, as a “crisis of adolescence”. Growing up, Ashutosh argued, meant tempering idealism with pragmatism. Admitting that those who emerged out of the anti-corruption movement to form the party may have initially nursed dreams of a new world, he told them what current day politics was actually about. “It’s not about idealism. It’s not about morality. It’s not a dream…It is power. Raw power.” The optics of the new party’s first political putsch may not have been very seemly, but the clinical efficiency with which it was carried out powerfully underscored Ashutosh’s point: electoral politics is about power, and the AAP’s supremo Arvind Kejriwal wields it with absolute ruthlessness. The fundamental rule of electoral politics is that only those who win elections can run governments. By extension, only those who can win elections can run political parties. Kejriwal’s message is clear — unless challengers can demonstrate better credentials when it comes to winning elections, it will be his way or the highway.

The developments also mark the political mainstreaming of the AAP, and the end of the party as a mass movement brought together by an overwhelming desire to bring about a change in political system. This overarching goal, at least in the initial stages, somehow managed to cobble over the inherent differences between the Gandhians, Left-liberal intellectuals, social activists and a politically amorphous urban middle-class under the AAP banner. The AAP has already seen the exit of most of the early star recruits from the more extreme ends of the ideological spectrum. The latest purge has largely removed the political intellectual quotient, which sought to reconstruct the standard Indian political party in a new mould, managed by a collegiate leadership and run on democratic lines.

As long as Kejriwal is content to remain in Delhi, where he is in absolute control, and forsake expanding nationally, this crisis in the AAP is somewhat insignificant and easily managed. The 67 party legislators in Delhi’s 70-member Assembly know who they owe their victory to, even if they have some differences over the way Bhushan and Yadav were ousted. But going forward, Kejriwal’s intolerance of dissent, and his reluctance to share space with others, has damaged the party’s image with the middle-class — which was responsible for his creation as a political phenomenon even if it didn’t contribute in the same measure to his stunning electoral triumph. The AAP’s unsustainable populism may continue to find some traction with his main support base — the urban poor. But while the politics of sops and tall promises may fetch immediate dividends, Kejriwal’s intolerance and autocratic ways will rob him of the USP that catapulted him to power — the promise of real change.

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