A bitter power struggle within the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is unfolding in full public view. On March 28, the AAP’s national council sacked Prashant Bhushan, Yogendra Yadav and two others from its national executive, accusing them of carrying out anti-party activities. On March 29, Admiral (Retd) L Ramdas was removed from the post of internal lok pal.
Only future research will reveal whether the struggle is ideological, strategic or simply a clash of personalities. Whatever its nature, it contains some danger of escalating to pose an existential risk — symptomatic of the transformation of a protest movement into a political party. Factional strife destroyed the Janata Party, formed after Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti movement around the Emergency, in a couple of years.
The founding members of the AAP were lieutenants of Kisan Hazare, the leader of the India Against Corruption (IAC) mass agitation. Almost exactly four years ago, many of them were managing the crowd at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, where Mr Hazare went on a hunger strike from April 5, 2011. The demand was for the passing of the Jan Lok Pal Bill to create an ombudsman with powers to arrest and charge government functionaries accused of corruption.
Corruption is not new in independent India. Shiv Bahadur Singh, the 26th “Rao” of Churhat and a descendant of a branch of the Rewa royal family, was a distinguished leader of the Indian National Congress and a minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet. He was convicted in 1950 of taking bribes to issue a forged document for a diamond mining firm and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Interestingly, Shiv Bahadur’s son Arjun Singh became a revered leader of Madhya Pradesh, its chief minister and also a Cabinet minister in Delhi. There were allegations of fraud against Arjun Singh for the Churhat lottery case, but nothing was proved beyond disproportionate assets.
The spontaneous support by former bureaucrats, journalists, academics and professional lawyers – the founders of the AAP – for the IAC movement, clearly showed that times had changed between 1950 and 2011. Tolerance for corruption was down with increasing literacy and growth of a vocal middle class. But movements rise and fall in a cyclic pattern. The sustainability of non-structured agitation under the IAC was doubtful. A survey suggested preference for direct involvement in politics. Some members of the IAC’s core team, led by Arvind Kejriwal, went ahead and formed the AAP in late 2012.
The December 2013 Vidhan Sabha elections in Delhi marked the AAP’s grand debut: victory in 28 of the 70 seats, next only to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s 31. No coalition government could be formed. Another Vidhan Sabha election followed in February 2015. The AAP won a landslide victory, bagging 67 of the 70 seats.
In Delhi, the AAP did not and does not face any “coalition compulsions”, a term popularised by the former prime minister Manmohan Singh. But it confronts the important dimensions of competitive party politics like informal power relations and formulation of actual decision-making processes. Not glaring problems in running a protest movement, they are critical issues when movements get integrated into the established political system. Furthermore, it is difficult to mobilise votes as a single-issue party. Moving from a single-issue (such as anti-corruption) movement to a political party requires defining the party’s position on many more issues, such as the left-libertarian cleavage, without alienating its support base.
The Congress exemplifies a success story in management of such a transition. The Congress spearheaded the freedom movement as a very large one-party coalition of disparate elements spanning moderates and extremists, and the whole ideological spectrum from left to right. Its transformation into a regular political party created dissension. The party saw a spate of dissidence from the early part of the last century, including by luminaries such as Chittaranjan Das, Motilal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, J B Kripalani and C Rajagopalachari. But the Congress managed these inner-party problems and the logic of party competition to rule India as a single party for over 40 years.
Dissidence within a party tends to surface more easily when the party does poorly in an election, as the Congress did after 1967 election. The AAP is no exception. Soon after its brilliant debut in the December 2013 Delhi Vidhan Sabha polls, the AAP lost to the BJP in all of Delhi’s seven Lok Sabha constituencies in April 2014. That was when dissension came to the surface. Charges against building a “personality cult” around Arvind Kejriwal were labelled by some prominent members. But, interestingly, charges of insufficient inner-party democracy did not go away even after its spectacular victory in Delhi in February 2015.
The issues raised by Mr Bhushan and Mr Yadav relate to inner-party democracy. In particular, they relate to how and who will decide the appropriateness of Mr Kejriwal holding the dual posts of Delhi chief minister and national convenor; of the AAP focusing only on Delhi or, as a national party, fighting elections in other parts of the country; and the candidates to be put up for elections.
To promote inner-party democracy, the Election Commission has the mandate to ask registered political parties to hold organisational elections at periodic intervals. But except for the BJP and the communist parties, all have been reluctant to hold them in a meaningful way. Such elections tend to foster factionalism and weaken party discipline. In the Congress, in recent times, the incumbent president faced a challenge in an election only in 1997.
After the Congress defeat in the April-May 1996 election, former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao resigned from the post of Congress president in September. Sitaram Kesri replaced him as interim president. In the June 1997 party presidential election – only the third in the party’s then 117-year-long history – Sharad Pawar and Rajesh Pilot challenged Kesri. Kesri won, but there were allegations of electoral malpractice. The end was tragic with the Congress Working Committee stripping the elected president of his post and replacing him with Sonia Gandhi in April 1998!
How successfully Mr Kejriwal manages the issue of inner-party democracy while maintaining party discipline will determine whether the AAP is seen as a sign of major transformation of the Indian political landscape with the rising middle class, or simply a manifestation of the cyclical recurrence of social protests. Transforming itself from a protest movement to a regular participant in conventional Indian politics is no easy task. But even if it fades away in the humdrum of managing the difficult job of running a well-oiled electioneering machine, hopefully, its legacy of institutionalising the idea behind the IAC’s corruption-free India will remain.
The writer is an economist
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