Delhi polls: How India's once-vaunted third party AAP has lost its shine

A decade of prioritising national ambitions over implementation has destroyed Kejriwal's chance of emerging as the progressive alternative to Modi

By Mihir S Sharma

 

Wednesday’s election in India’s capital of Delhi has been the focus of attention across the country. The 15 million registered voters here can’t compare to the billion eligible nationally. But they will judge whether a once-promising alternative model of Indian politics deserves another chance.

 

About a decade ago, a new political force — the Aam Aadmi Party, led by a maverick anti-corruption crusader named Arvind Kejriwal — stormed into office in Delhi, pledging to clean up politics and transform governance. It had then been ruled for 15 years by the old-world grandees of the Congress Party. But successive winters of protests over corruption, inflation, and the safety of women had eroded the venerable party’s hold on the city. Kejriwal, who led some of those protests, became a middle-class hero as a consequence. He rode that reputation into the chief minister’s office in Delhi.

 

 

Many believe that Delhi is a microcosm of the nation — only not of India today, but of its future. It is relatively well off, and its citizens more demanding. Residents hail from all over, and appeals to caste, ethnic and regional identity that work elsewhere are  less effective here. Delhi seemed like the best place for a new politics, organized around service delivery, governance reform and grassroots accountability, to take hold.

 

This was what Kejriwal assured the country he would provide. He would succeed in India’s most future-focused city — and then, one by one, other enclaves of prosperity and progress would fall to the Aam Aadmi Party, whose name in Hindi means “Common Man.” Eventually, it would displace Congress as the principal opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party.  

 

Not even Kejriwal can claim he has fulfilled those hopes. In the decade-plus that AAP has dominated this city’s politics, India’s gross domestic product has increased more than threefold. Delhi is not three times as liveable. If anything, it is a more difficult city than it was under the Congress. It has the worst air quality in the world; it is running out of water; and there may be fewer bus routes than there were in 2013.

 

Those are big failures, but they could have been forgiven if the AAP government had at least stuck to the basics. The governance ideology it championed was organized around radical decentralization and grassroots participation. In a country where state schools are run by unaccountable bureaucrats and local public health systems are barely present, Kejriwal promised local management committees for schools and community-run clinics.

 

That seemed to work initially. Elections were held for school boards for the first time and patients seemed satisfied by the free primary care at community clinics. But results haven’t held up over time; drop-out rates are higher than the national average, and the clinics have been embroiled in scandals over sub-standard medicines.

 

Worse, the focus on decentralization has come at the expense of world-class facilities. Delhi has about as many hospitals as it did a decade ago, although incomes and its population have risen. Transport infrastructure, other than the independently-run Metro, is no better than it was, and the city comes to a halt every time it gets a couple of inches of rain.

 

Kejriwal, with some justice, blames some of these failures on the Modi-led federal apparatus. Indeed, he was jailed last year, along with other top party leaders, over allegations (which they've denied) of a liquor excise scam. It certainly looks to most observers as if his government and its programs have been specifically targeted by Modi’s government. But the average voter, even if she knows this, doesn’t care: Many Indians believe that part of a chief minister’s job is to get along with the prime minister well enough to intercede on behalf of his state’s residents.

 

But that was never AAP’s game plan. Rather than demonstrate to the country that they were better administrators than Modi, they prioritized their geographical expansion outside Delhi. After successive failures in various other relatively urban states, they displaced the Congress from its northern stronghold of Punjab in 2022. This single-minded effort alienated other opposition parties and left them facing the BJP’s ire without friends or allies.

 

For a party with a hold on the politics of just two of India’s states, the AAP still talks a big game. Kejriwal said on Jan. 26 that this election featured a choice between the BJP’s ideology of cronyism and his model of “free electricity, education, health care, and transport.” This is a bit unfair given the Delhi BJP has released a long list of subsidies and giveaways it will somehow pay for if elected.

 

Still, if free stuff is all the AAP is reduced to, that is failure enough. The party’s pledges in this election — a salary for Hindu and Sikh priests, foreign education for students from underprivileged castes, weddings arranged for the daughters of those who drive Delhi’s ubiquitous three-wheelers — sound like they’re throwing the populist kitchen sink at this vote. It does not set them apart from any other party, let alone Modi’s, which prides itself on welfare programs.

 

Kejriwal may yet win another term in Delhi; he remains personally popular with its residents. But a decade of prioritising his national ambitions over implementation has destroyed his chance of emerging as the progressive alternative to Modi.  (Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper)