Aam Aadmi Party – Fourth Myth

Sunil Rajguru, who is a kindred spirit, has written an article which is in line with some of our own theories. He beat us to the punch and kudos to him. He has listed seven myths about the Aam Aadmi party. Here we are going to go through each myth and add our own opinion to it.

You can win a national campaign within 6 months.

The Congress was formed in 1885 and came to power in 1947. The RSS was formed in 1925 and the Bharatiya Sangh was formed in 1951 and they came to power in 1977. The BJP was formed in 1980 and came to power in 1996.
Even being a credible Opposition is not easy. The CPI was formed in 1925. C Rajagopalachari was our first Governor General in 1948 but his Swatantra Party formed in 1959 took 8 years to become the principal Opposition in 1967.
No party can conquer a large, rich diverse country as India in a matter of months. And Kejriwal is no Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru.

Right again but Sunil does not mention one thing i.e. the change in the national polity with regional and caste-based aspirations overtaking national interests. Congress and Bhartiya Janasangh are two different pre-independence ideas, largely agreeing on the national interest issues. Now the regional parties often force Indian strategies. When talking to important neighbors like Sri Lanka and Bangla Desh, the GoI has to defer to the CM’s of Tamilnadu and WB respectively. Caste lines have become much sharper. It will be hard for any party to form government at the center on their own. The best one can hope is to cross a certain 200+ seat magic mark after which post poll alliance formation becomes easy. AAP whose power base is Delhi is not projected to win more than a couple of seats in New Delhi where the voters are a lot more homogenous than the rest of the nation. I do not see them winning any seats in Mumbai where the contest is going to be multi cornered with regional and caste lines sharply drawn.

As Sunil says, a party will need a charismatic leader who can galvanize the country behind him or her to make a case for national prominence in six months. Kejriwal does not fit that bill. The reason why the AAP is getting so many volunteers (the numbers are being overstated by the media in that you have to compare the AAP supporters with let’s say the NaMo brigade to get the feel for AAP momentum) is because undecided liberal voters have decided to club Congress as well as the BJP together as part of the establishment. By going to AAP, they are trying to vote against establishment. In a way they are right. The BJP has so far done a few things that are quite similar to Congress in parts. Propping up Vijay Goel was a BJP establishment move. Rajnath Singh / Narendra Modi who are outsiders brought in Dr. Harshvardhan and immediately changed BJP’s fortunes in Delhi. There were four seats in Delhi that the BJP lost by less than a total of 2000 votes. The point is that with Modi’s induction, the BJP is no longer Advani’s party and can now claim to be the party that they set out to be. Voting for Modi is no longer a vote for the status quo.

Sooner or later Kejriwal will have to hit the campaign trail to make a national case for AAP. He will have to talk about his vision of India (which he claims to lack) and real solutions to serious problems. While Modi has chalked out plans that have already worked and are implementable nationally, Kejriwal will have to say Lokpal as an answer to all the problems. He will be exposed. He needs a lot more than just protest votes to win. Not only does he lack the charisma and oratory of Modi but his message in extremely one dimensional. In short, the AAP does not have the requisite stuff to make a national case for them.

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