A conversation, factual or embellished, with a taxi driver has been the oldest ploy in the journalist’s book. Sometimes it sparks new ideas, sometimes it helps to substantiate your hypothesis, and occasionally it is a farcical ploy to put in an anonymous mouth a too-clever one-liner you’d rather not utter yourself, but say nevertheless. A conversation with a top fund manager in a hotel lift is a different proposition, and a new spin on the old taxi-driver wisdom.
So, how far do you think AAP will reach? How will the BJP recover? Can the Congress survive? He asked as we climbed from the first floor to the third of the suburban Mumbai hotel where I had just dispensed an hour’s gyan to a hall full of moneyed people like, and including, him. Then he answered it more succinctly than I had, and in the time taken from floor 3 to 10. “Modern politics has now become like the IT industry,” he said. “Just as smart tech start-ups keep disrupting established giants, a political start-up has disrupted established, big parties. The big question now, do they understand this? And how will they respond?”
Let’s test this proposition in some detail. It is easy to see how AAP is a start-up. First of all, it literally is one. Most of our established parties, national and regional, are old, multi-generation brands such as the Congress, BJP, CPI(M), Akali Dal, Shiv Sena, DMK. Or they are derivatives, offshoots and splinters such as the AIADMK, the many baby Congresses, TRC, TMC, NCP. Or amorphous, opportunistic amalgams, rather khichdis, such as the old Janata Party and its own estranged offspring, the Biju Janata Dal, JD(U) and many Lok Dals. Come to think of it, our politics hasn’t thrown up many start-ups. The last ones I can think of are the Asom Gana Parishad in 1985 and NTR’s Telugu Desam in 1982. Both, by the way, were an instant, stunning success. Both have endured for three decades or more, though the one in Assam now seems to be fading away, its leaders and votes moving to the BJP.
AAP is even more of a start-up than these. The closer parallel is the AGP, which also morphed from an honest young people’s movement with wide, emotional support, imaginative agitational tactics and a largely sympathetic media. Covering the movement closely as a newspaper reporter in 1981-83, its years of high idealism, I was amazed and stirred by such commitment and integrity at a very young age. Of course, the party took no time to evolve into “normal” political behaviour, but that is another story. I was not surprised seeing Rajmohan Gandhi in studios talking about AAP with adulation. Similar idealism had attracted him to Assam as a student leader in the early 80s, which is when we first met as he visited me at my home in Shillong. The TDP is a little different; at least it had a big film star launch it.
The Aam Aadmi Party has sharper features of a modern-day start-up. It has the kernel of a new thought so essential for a disruptive idea: changing the way a business is done. Compare, say, Flipkart or Snapdeal with Kishore Biyani’s Future, Tata’s Croma or Reliance Retail. It is mostly led by under-50s, which is Indian politics’ equivalent of IT people in their 20s. And its real troopers are barely in their twenties. You want to see how much younger, full of attitude they are, replay the footage of the members of the BJP and AAP celebrating victory in 2014 and last week, respectively. One, the familiar old way, stuffing mithai in each other’s mouths, loading the leaders with garlands and bursting crackers. The other erupting in flash mobs, some even live in TV studios, singing and dancing steps perfected over many a wedding baraat and sangeet. And see how young they look. AAP is not even the classical case of a set of people growing out of student politics into the big league. Its heft and lung power come from thousands of supporters still in college.
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Like a classical start-up, it also carries no baggage, respects no legacy and finds reputation contemptible. Yogendra Yadav answers the larger question of AAP’s ideology with a brilliant turn of political phraseology: the problem is, people cannot fit us into one of the ideological boxes that evolved in the early 20th century. We are willing to learn from everything and choose what works best. Of course, you know the box in which he belongs, or Prashant Bhushan or his self-proclaimed opposite pole, Kumar Vishwas. But none of them represents the ideology of AAP. It is still a work in progress and probably the right product in post-ideological times when India is muscled forward by an ambitious, me-first, selfie generation. In a very vaguely defined manner (and I know the comparison would enrage genuine intellectuals), AAP is evolving like the Congress did in its early days, having the right, left, even libertarians under its umbrella in pursuit of a common idea, not ideology. You can even stretch that comparison to the dumping of Gandhi, though the children of Anna Hazare have done it rather more brutally.
The Aam Aadmi Party is now looking more and more like a cult built around Arvind Kejriwal, borrowing whatever ideas will make their product sell. They have taken the self-pitying, povertarian, freebie-laden discourse from the Congress, soft Hindutva, including Bharat Mata and Vande Mataram, from the BJP, and patriotic Sunny Deol hyper with Bhagat Singh and Inquilab Zindabad from Anna. Most amusingly, a “deshbhakti” song that often played at AAP rallies was “Dil Diya Hai Jaan Bhi Denge, Ai Watan Tere Liye” from the Dilip Kumar-starrer Karma.
So how do you describe a new party with such a mish-mash ideology built around one leader who is as far from being a Naxal as Prashant Bhushan is from being a corporate trumpeter. It is a start-up still finding its way, in spite of its brilliant success. How Kejriwal and his ideas evolve would eventually determine whether AAP grows into a genuine pan-national phenomenon or fizzles out as a flash mob in the pan.
More important is how the two establishment brands respond to the threat. The Congress has a much bigger problem as AAP has started to grow while India’s GOP is still enjoying its equivalent of a jaded college kid’s gap year. AAP is also taking away its ideas, including some, like the devolution of powers, that Rahul Gandhi has been talking about but without much success. In Delhi, the wholesale migration of the Congress vote to AAP is even more significant than the Modi-Amit Shah defeat. There is no reason why this pattern won’t repeat in Punjab, or in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. That could spell the end of the Congress because a younger, sharper and enormously more audacious alternative is now available to fill the centre-left political space it is vacating.
Still, you see no great urgency from the Congress. Its leadership is distracted, lacking in focus and organisation. Its three-term chief minister Sheila Dikshit would have done something right to be able to rule this difficult city for 15 years. But the party kept her completely out of the campaign, nor did it talk about her government’s achievements. While AAP has disrupted all old politics, it is now threatening to finish the Congress nationally.
The BJP has a different problem. Its leaders have suffered their first setback. How it responds now will determine its future as also AAP’s. Will it be more like the Congress, which means complacent? Will it continue with its “American-funded Naxalite AAP” farce on prime-time and, in that psyched state, give the new, start-up upstart more space to play in? This will also involve a return to harder Hindutva. But then, AAP is not merely a gang of fire-spewing Left-liberals. Behind its pink veneer of socialism, it is also chanting Vande Mataram with greater passion than the BJP. It is also challenging BJP’s status as the only heartland party with a committed volunteer cadre. If AAP grows, many new BJP/Modi backers (non-RSS) may defect, just as Congress voters did last week. The BJP should note that one specific area where AAP has given them a hiding is on social media. Its young punks have understood quickly that technology is the new AK-47 for the toiling masses-versus-the rest. Its social media activism is sharper, cleverer, more strategic and effective. The only area where it doesn’t quite match up fully is abusiveness.
More than its strategic and tactical errors in Delhi, the BJP has been reprimanded for the fact that the aura of invincibility has made it go back to the ways of the Congress: securing defections, personality cult, contempt for opposition, media, even Parliament. As my fund-manager fellow traveller in the lift would probably have said, this is all obsolete, old economy stuff. If the BJP persists with this, it runs the risk of losing political capital faster than even Rajiv Gandhi did (1984-89). Remember, those were the pre-computer old economy years. Rajiv had begun with a much greater majority (413) and popular adulation. In the first two years he would say nothing that wouldn’t bring tears of joy to our mothers’ eyes. Then he could say nothing that wouldn’t make our children laugh. Politics is a cruel market, and remember again, he was tripped by an unconventional start-up too.
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