The revolution will not be subsidised
AAP's rise in Delhi politics has been marked by welfare schemes, but its lack of ideological challenge to BJP may cost it support amid shifting voter bases.
Ten years is not a very long time in politics or in the life of a political party. It is normal for political preferences and fortunes of political parties to evolve over decades. The Congress’s fortunes, for example, started declining in the 1960s and finally collapsed in the 2010s. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh — the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) previous avatar — struggled with its politics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, had a disastrous new stint when it rechristened itself as the BJP in the early 1980s, and finally started gaining ground in 1989 before establishing itself as the dominant hegemon a decade ago.
It is on this front that the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) story is fascinating in fast-forward mode. It came out of nowhere in 2013 and went on to sweep the Delhi assembly elections in 2015 and 2020. What was even more remarkable about the AAP’s landslide victories in the Delhi assembly elections was the fact that it was powered by a section of the BJP’s voter base. The latter always had a much higher vote share and seat share in the Lok Sabha elections than in the assembly elections.
A section of the BJP’s voters supporting the AAP in assembly elections was a clear case of peaceful coexistence between Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister, and Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister. The terms of this arrangement became increasingly clear over the years. The AAP’s traction in Delhi was on account of three things in order of importance. First, its income support programmes such as power and water subsidies to the poor, which, to give credit where it is due, have been emulated by political parties across the country. One can criticise this from the perspective of fiscal prudence, but it is also a fact that this is a democratic assertion of a large economically precarious population. The second was the AAP’s strategy of offering political representation to a cohort of Delhi’s voters, Purvanchalis, whose demographic rise is a relatively recent phenomenon. The third was a consolidation of Muslim votes behind the AAP as the most credible party to defeat the BJP. The intersection between voters of the AAP and the BJP was primarily on account of the first two factors.
What the AAP was not allowed to or not willing to do — in reality, it must have been a dialectic between the two real and imaginary constraints — was to challenge the BJP on the latter’s core ideological politics, namely, Hindutva. The AAP might have wanted to keep this contradiction in cold storage, but events in Delhi and national politics in the last five years, beginning with the agitation against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the 2020 riots in Delhi increasingly made this impossible. These events and its political positioning around them increasingly took the AAP away from being symptomatic of a liberal party of populism — what is also described as secular in Indian politics — towards a populist party prone to placating the majority. Disenchantment among Muslims aside – it was also visible in the 2022 Municipal Corporation of Delhi elections where the Congress ended up with more Muslim corporators than the AAP — it also alienated a section of economically well-off progressive voters in Delhi.
This ideological disenchantment was worsened by the material worsening in Delhi’s infrastructure, which was the result of a conscious decision and a difficult constraint faced by the AAP government. The former was its choice to reduce capital spending to increase revenue spending to fund its populist schemes. The city’s infrastructure went from being obsolete to being in a state of disrepair. The latter, far from insignificant, was the continuous disruption by the BJP government at the Centre and its lieutenant governor (LG) in Delhi in the functioning of the AAP government. Central agencies arresting important AAP leaders contributed to the government’s troubles.
The end result of all this was a significant loss of the non-poor vote for the AAP in these elections. As we pointed out in these pages, this is not an insignificant section of voters in Delhi.
What does all this mean in the context of today’s results in Delhi?
Theatrics aside, there is only one way to look at the results. The voter base of the BJP which used to make an exception for the AAP in previous assembly elections has not done so this time. It is more likely to be non-poor than poor.
To be sure, one should be careful when writing obituaries for the AAP today. It still has a 40% plus vote share. But one also needs to ask a question at the same time. If the BJP really goes on to fulfil its promise of matching all the AAP’s existing and promised welfare programmes in Delhi, are people, including those who have voted for the AAP, really going to miss it? Would things have been different had the AAP tried to build an ideological challenge against the BJP rather than putting all its eggs in the welfare basket?
To say this is not to belittle the importance of welfare in Indian politics, but it also means that welfare alone cannot be the driving force behind the broader ideological battle between the Hindu Right and the secular challenge to it. It is on this front that the balance of forces shifted decisively to the right after the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha victory. Today is a good day to paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron’s famous song to make a point about the future of Indian politics: The revolution will not be subsidised.
The views expressed are personal