Kejriwal’s Gambit
Tactics, Strategy and the Aam Aadmi Party
About a year back Arvind Kejriwal caused a kerfuffle with a tweet congratulating the country on the new temple at you-know-where. I wondered aloud on my alumni group if Kejriwal had crossed the line from pragmatic politician to communal apologist.
A good friend who is a politics junkie, a fairly astute one at that, pinged me back privately to say that these are all faltu questions, Kejriwal was like any other run of the mill politician.
I disagree with that assessment as being too simplistic. I am going to argue here that there is a longer term strategic objective that explains some of these pronouncements by Kejriwal, specifically, and others from the Aam Aadmi Party (“AAP”), more generally; that there is a method to this apparent randomness.
Cast your mind back to the run up to the 2020 Delhi elections. A lot was made out of the Hanuman Bhakt/Chalisa trope at the time. It set quite a few aflutter on liberal twitter, where he was called several things for falling afoul of secular principles. But as is now conventionally accepted hindsight, Kejriwal and the AAP played the game smartly, taking the sting out of the ‘Hindu vs anti-Hindu’ polarization attempt of the BJP, enabling them to pivot the discussion to development and service delivery.
Tactically, so far so good. But what, if anything, does this tell us about the long term strategic thoughts of the Kejriwal/AAP. Unless we are clear on what is the goal/objective/strategy we cannot begin to understand what is an acceptable or pragmatic compromise and at what point does it become a case of selling out to the rabid right.
Here is my take on what Kejriwal hopes to achieve, the way I see it. You can fault me for not being cynical enough, to the point of naiveté — time will tell.
I am going to take Kejriwal’s words at face value that he is here to stop the cycle of corruption, to stop politicians stealing our money, our dreams for tomorrow. It is fairly obvious that the root cause of corruption is what is euphemistically called party funding i.e. the money required for a politician and political parties to get elected and stay in power.
The former, i.e. the money required to get elected, is common knowledge. Many of us, for example, have first or second hand knowledge of domestic staff (cooks/maids/drivers) who have been given a few hundred or even a couple of thousand rupees and assorted freebies for their promised vote. The second aspect, the cost to run a constituency after being elected, is less appreciated.
The gush of cash leaking out of the politician’s bucket doesn’t stop on voting day. He (since it is mostly men) needs to spend through his term, from sponsoring uniforms for Dahi-Handi teams to organizing cricket tournaments for slum kids. Mr Politico needs to have people on his staff who can make the calls required to get constituents into schools and hospitals and so on, to be the feet, and occasionally the muscle, on the street.
In this aspect Indians behave not as citizens but subjects. They are looking not for representation but protection or intermediation for access to public goods and services¹. This is the Mai-Baap Sarkar syndrome.
All of this is funded ultimately by corruption. A politician who spends in crores to get elected expects to recover 5–10x that amount over his term. In many parts of the country, especially the more prosperous southern and western states, we have evolved from the crass politician who traffics in retail corruption to the more polished model of today where rent is extracted from the licensing of scarce resources, be it land or bandwidth, away from the view of the average middle class citizen, given to easy outrage.
Ending or even limiting corruption requires tackling this root cause. It is not easy to change this deeply entrenched model. All the established political parties understand how it works. Moreover, the people in power have the opportunity and incentive to capture a significant portion of this fund flow for themselves. The average wealth of sitting legislators increased 222% during just one term in office (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-38607255). An interesting side effect is that it limits the incentive for a ruling politician to improve the governments service delivery capability, which would take away their role as the conduit, and the power that consequently flows from it.
AAP is the only party so far to have attempted to circumvent this logic, with a view to subverting it in the long term. Born as it was out of middle class angst at the status quo and a desire for change, it seems to have successfully tapped this base to raise funds to run its campaign. Like American political parties, AAP sends out email messages to past and prospective donors to stump up whatever money they can, treating people as citizens who are more invested in the process of choosing their representatives than just an infrequent trudge to the polling station.
The moneys raised thus are likely to be modest, leaving little for AAP representatives to hire large staffs to pander to their constituents. This has an interesting, and desirable, side effect. They are incentivized to improve the quality of service delivery to blunt the need for political intermediation in obtaining government service. As a result, their constituents receive benefit from the right source i.e. government servants appointed for exactly those functions, not the semi-educated goons and hangers-on that generally populate the orbits of Indian politicians.
However there is a serious bottleneck preventing the rapid spread of this new model. It requires a certain income level among the citizenry, for an educated self-awareness and an ability to look beyond the Mai-Baap behaviour, a willingness to donate money to support a political cause and engage in the political process that requires effort beyond pressing a button on some voting machine.
Given its demographics, Delhi has proved an ideal laboratory for this experiment. But where next.
Punjab seemed promising for a while, till Amarinder Singh re-established the Congress as the natural party of power². With the Akalis looking unlikely to go quietly into the night, there is little political space for an upstart, although AAP still remains in contention.
Goa seems like the next obvious arena, both for the size of the state (which makes it easier to build momentum to a tipping point for flipping the state) as well as the high per capita GDP. Goa is made further attractive by the fact that it doesn’t have two clear poles in its polity, two parties that take turns being the incumbent as many other Indian states do.
I heard an AAP spokesman talk a while back about the potential to replace the Congress as one of the poles in states where the Congress, having been in opposition for decades, long deprived of the sustenance provided by access to power and money, has begun to atrophy, creating space for a different alternative. Examples such as Gujarat and Odisha were proffered, but these examples ignore the reality of income levels. At current income levels, only the traditional rent extraction and service intermediation model can work.
A tangential point is that the window of opportunity in Gujarat and Odisha (if one existed), seems to have closed. Congress seems to have regained a measure of vitality in Gujarat, while in Odisha the BJP is on the verge of establishing itself as the alternative to the BJD.
So what does this mean for AAP’s roadmap? AAP will have to be an urban-centric party for the foreseeable future. Maybe it can win a few municipalities if ever these institutions benefit from a real devolution of power.
It is perhaps instructive to look at a parallel evolution of a political entity. The right question to ask is — who was AAP’s predecessor as an urban-centric party, a party that failed to connect with the urban poor and struggled to connect with rural India?
People with memories longer than the current omniscience of the Gujarati duo will remember that this was the BJP. The one time party of merchants and traders, the so called ‘bania-brahmin’ party. It was this foothold that sustained the party while it perfected its current handbook, the merits of which I will not go into in this essay. My proposition is that AAP can only advance by supplanting the BJP in its natural home terrain.
However AAP cannot be the new BJP, that is not in their DNA. Even if it was, being BJP-lite is not going to get them any traction while the real thing is around.
This leads us to their conundrum. AAP has reached to where it has by replacing the Congress as one pole of Delhi politics, but that doesn’t look like the natural path for them going forward. The logic of their situation means that they need to co-opt as much of the current BJP voters as possible, leaving aside the hard-core, foaming at the mouth, rabid fringe. This, middle, group of voters dislikes the Congress for its dynasty, its history of ‘pandering’ to groups and interests that they do not identify with. They also yearn for the economic freedoms that will deliver growth and an improved quality of life. They fear that corruption will eat away their dreams for their children. They are not interested in living in a fractured, violent society and whatever aspirations existed around assertion of ‘Hindu pride’ have probably been assuaged by now. They are also educated and affluent enough to engage with AAP’s political model.
The BJP has thus far done a clever job of painting its opponents as anti-national, which it has conflated with being anti-Hindu. It is to the credit of AAP that it saw the trap and skirted it so cleverly. They also chose not to walk into the soft-Hindutva minefield that the Congress wanders into from time to time, like in Gujarat a couple of election cycles ago. I think the choice of Hanuman Bhakti and Hanuman Chalisa is not accidental. It is Hindu enough without being threatening — the Hinduism of personal faith, not public diatribe and rancour. Since we can’t consider a political discussion complete without a Bollywood reference, remember Bajrangi Bhaijaan, the story of the staunch Hanuman bhakt who is more interested in re-uniting a lost child with her family than in the specifics of her nationality or religious affiliation, because that is the higher moral imperative.
There is some risk in this strategy, a danger in going too far down the path, to the point where they get perceived (by the voters) as the BJP’s ‘B’ team. It will be hard, but critically necessary, for them to get the balance right.
In the light of this logic, it will be interesting to see how AAP evolves. It may be natural for them to grab at the obvious opportunity that the decay of the INC presents, but the preceding analysis suggest that it is not a natural fit for their model. The Congress may yet revive once the long shadow of the Gandhis no longer blights everything that attempts to grow under it, or it may decay to the point of disintegration. In the latter scenario, their replacement is as likely to be the socialist-communists that seem to be getting a new wind in Bihar, and could spread to other states, for we are still a very poor country where a natural market exists for redistribution of a wealth that barely exists. ‘Garibi Hatao’ may be discredited as a slogan but the sentiment can still resonate. AAP’s future lies as a socially liberal and an economically right of center party and its success seems contingent on eating away at the BJP’s support. It will be an interesting story to watch. Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost.
- Some of this discussion is based on an illuminating episode of the Seen and the Unseen podcast featuring political scientist Milan Vaishnav https://seenunseen.in/episodes/2019/4/1/episode-114-crime-in-indian-politics/
- Ground realities are changing swiftly in Punjab, with Gandhis looking like they are willing to sabotage Amarinder Singh even if it sinks the government in the state because, presumably, they cannot tolerate an alternate power center. This potentially reopens the door for the AAP to challenge again for power.