Punjab debacle in mind, AAP keeps ‘remote control’ away in Haryana

File image of Arvind Kejriwal at a press conference in New Delhi | Vijay Verma/PTI

In party chief Arvind Kejriwal’s home state, AAP seems to have learnt its lessons and is getting ready for the Lok Sabha and Haryana assembly polls next year.

Chandigarh: In the run up to the parliamentary elections and the subsequent assembly elections in Haryana next year, the Aam Aadmi Party seems to have learnt the lessons from its failure in the Punjab assembly polls nearly two years ago.

AAP was billed as a major — even dominant by some accounts — political player in Punjab in 2016, with a large number of observers predicting its rise to power. However, come election results day, and the Congress under Captain Amarinder Singh which swept to power with 77 seats out of 117, with AAP finishing a distant second with just 20 seats.

A visibly chastened party chief Arvind Kejriwal is now hoping to find a foothold in Haryana, his home state, using the lessons learnt in Punjab.

 

Remote control locked away

One of the principal reasons for AAP’s bad performance in Punjab was the dissatisfaction among leaders and the general public about leaders from Delhi attempting to run the state unit by ‘remote control’.

But in Haryana, at least for now, the remote control seems to have been locked away. There seems to be no plan to leave decisions to the Delhi-based leadership divorced from ground realities of local and regional sentiments. Instead, local leaders with their own specific mobilisation of supporters and activists are the chosen instruments of campaigning.

“We are all set for the elections. Our house is in order and ready to throw out ‘CBI’ — Congress, BJP and INLD from the state,” said Haryana AAP chief Naveen Jaihind.

The state executive is a 10-member body led by Jaihind, and all its members are Haryanvis. The entire plan for the parliamentary and assembly elections is being overseen by the executive.

This is a far cry from Punjab, where the state executive, formed after the parliamentary elections of 2014, featured the party’s four Punjab MPs, and acted as an alternate power centre to then-state chief Sucha Singh Chhotepur.

Also unlike Punjab, where Chhotepur was thrown out a few months before the elections and the party went into the elections without a dominant local face, in Haryana, Kejriwal has given pride of place to Jaihind.

 

The observers

Haryana, like Punjab, has a set of ‘Delhi observers’ for each parliamentary seat, but these observers are answerable not just to the Delhi leadership of the party but also to Haryana’s powerful state executive. In Punjab, the brusque and abrasive behaviour of the ‘Delhi observers’ and the complete lack of accountability, had proved the undoing of the AAP’s otherwise formidable challenge.

“The Delhi observers are not working visibly in the front at all, but remain in the background. They have been forbidden from interacting publicly with the press, and maintain a low profile,” said Sudhir Yadav, AAP’s spokesperson in Haryana.

Party structure

While AAP was barely able to fill up posts at the organisational level on parliamentary seats and assembly segments in Punjab, in Haryana, the party structure is already in place.

“There is a parliamentary sangathan mantri (organisation in-charge) and a parliamentary seat adhyaksh (president), apart from a Delhi observer taking care of every Lok Sabha seat. There are also zila adhyaksh (district heads), Vidhan Sabha sangathan mantris and a Vidhan Sabha adhyaksh,” Yadav said.

The party is also taking care to involve only those from the Delhi leadership who have valid grounds to interfere in Haryana politics. “For instance, some MLAs in Delhi have their ancestral towns or villages in Haryana, and they have been asked to contact their relatives and extended families and support AAP,” Yadav said.

The Haryana leadership also feels that unlike Punjab, where Delhi’s AAP leaders stuck out like sore thumbs because of the inability to speak the local language, in Haryana, the problem will be much smaller. “Delhi being next to Haryana, the AAP leadership feels better equipped to campaign here,” Yadav added.