Broom swept aside in MCD polls: Why AAP lost despite populist agenda

AAP must face facts if it doesn't want to lose relevance

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) urgently need to stop pointless protests over electronic voting machine fraud and focus on undertaking a realistic assessment of the drubbing the party received in the Delhi municipal elections. The AAP’s tally of 48 seats overall — just 27 in its traditional strongholds of the east and south — to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s 181 (up from 138 in 2012) suggests that other factors contributed to this underwhelming performance. Certainly, much more was expected from a party that registered a stunning 67-seat majority in the 70-member Assembly in 2015, presaging the emergence of a more credible Left-Centre opposition to the right-wing BJP than the largely discredited Congress. Taken together with the disappointing results in Punjab, where, instead of forming the government, it won just 20 seats, and Goa, where it failed to even open its account, the AAP appears to have lost substantial traction from its heady 2012 launch on an anti-corruption platform. Mr Kejriwal’s politics of unrelenting confrontation essentially squandered the early goodwill. That is why the BJP swept all three corporations even though it had clearly mismanaged administration — the sanitation workers’ strike for unpaid wages that turned Delhi into a giant garbage heap occurred as recently as late last year. The AAP lost despite some achievements in slum development and mohalla clinics and a populist agenda that included scrapping property tax.  

It was the BJP, however, that absorbed the lessons by employing the subliminal tactic of plastering the city-state with posters of Mr Modi and Amit Shah, and replacing the old counsellors with fresh faces, including appointing as state chief Manoj Tiwari, a “poorvanchali” in a city where a third of the population hails from eastern Uttar Pradesh/western Bihar. The BJP openly treats every election — Assembly, municipal, by-poll — as a stepping stone for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, and from that standpoint this win is another significant boost. In electoral terms, this third serial underperformance by the AAP realistically rules out Mr Kejriwal’s projected challenge to Mr Modi in Gujarat, where Assembly elections are due at the end of this year and for which the AAP was exploring a tie-up with disaffected Patidar leader Hardik Patel. The bizarre point about this municipal election is that the city-state’s appalling civic governance appeared to be the least of anybody’s concerns. Cow protection, the Babri Masjid/Ram Mandir controversy and other elements of the Hindutva platforms were all mentioned but not the dismal performance of the corporations. The BJP would do well to make the capital a model of civic administration for India’s other beleaguered cities to emulate. That would be a genuine achievement and would transcend the narrow politics of electoral victories. 

Before future municipal elections are held, some thought should also be given on the structural change needed in Delhi. The accelerating deterioration can be traced to the Congress government’s decision to split the corporation into three, entailing a tripling of administrative costs without commensurate increases in revenue. This has been the proximate reason for months of unpaid wages to municipal workers. It would not be a bad idea to go back to the original model.