Late last December when I was in India, I met two friends who were leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). They were enthusiastic and serious, concerned about the state of the nation, and had left highly successful careers to become part of the change they wished to see in India.
They were sincere about their beliefs, but neither gave their party more than 17-18 seats in the assembly elections that were to be held in Delhi in early February. I had been in Delhi and seen the sleek posters and banners of the Bharatiya Janata Party coming up at important junctions.
The BJP has resources, and the Narendra Modi wave appeared to be invincible – it had made impressive gains in Jammu and Kashmir, and in Maharashtra its gamble of going it alone had also paid off.
Besides, the Congress had ruled Delhi for 15 years, and could hardly be disregarded. For AAP, it was clearly going to be an unequal battle, and my friends’ circumspection seemed entirely sensible.
But something changed in the few weeks that followed, and in the end, AAP secured all but three of Delhi’s 70 seats in the Vidhan Sabha elections – perhaps the greatest electoral sweep of all time in India.
BJP supporters are making light of Arvind Kejriwal’s astonishing victory by claiming that a Delhi chief minister is the equivalent of a town mayor – if so, the blitzkrieg, in the form of buying the front page of every daily in Delhi in the days before the election, sending Modi on a barnstorming tour of the capital, deploying over a hundred members of parliament to campaign, was vastly disproportionate.
If the BJP lavishes such resources for a mere town mayorship, what would it do for the next parliamentary elections?
It is ridiculous to see in these results the “end” of the Modi mystique. As some BJP supporters have correctly pointed out, Delhi sends less than 2% of India’s state legislators, and just over 1% of MPs. Its vote share – around a third of the city’s electorate – has stayed about the same.
Congress, on the other hand, needs to worry – its vote share has collapsed utterly, and capping as it does a series of defeats in state legislatures, it faces serious existential questions. Congress has enormous resilience, and is not about to roll over and die, but it simply cannot wait for the BJP to make mistakes and return to power.
AAP has now ensured that it can credibly represent the aspirations of Indians who abhor BJP’s sectarianism and who like inclusive, egalitarian ethos that the Congress has long claimed. AAP won’t be a major force in the next parliamentary elections in 2019, but if it stays on its course and doesn’t disappoint voters – as many non-Congress alliances have done historically – it has the opportunity to reshape Indian politics.
This is because at heart, Indian voters shun extremes. BJP’s remarkable rise – from about 16% of the popular vote two decades ago, to nearly double that size now – shows the alignment of socially conservative Hindus. But it also shows that two-third of Indians reject it; for them, the default option tended to be the Congress.
That has changed, at least for now. The Congress can reinvent itself, but to do that, it would have to discard its feudal practice of obeying the current leadership and its ancestors.