Badri Raina
The performance of the Aam Aadmi Party in the just concluded Assembly elections in the Capital city of India has been, however you look at it, a phenomenal event, and very likely a watershed departure in the political culture of Indian democracy. Indeed, India’s Left parties must wonder at the circumstance that where they have failed election after election to make a dent in Delhi’s hitherto customary two-party political structure, a fledgling new force should have out of nowhere succeeded with the aplomb it has the very first time it chose to wet its feet.
This for the reason that the credibility of its appeal did not remain limited to the yuppie sections of metropolitan society but, indeed, penetrated to sections of the hoi polloi who have traditionally belonged to a habitual Congress party vote-bank. In that sense, pundits who had imagined that the campaign of the AAP would not cut across classes have been proved wrong. One reason why Narendra Modi’s trumpeted interventions in Delhi fell equally flat—notice that the vote-share of the BJP, instead of sky-rocketing owing to the Modi infusion, has actually gone down to its lowest ever in the Capital—has been that many falanges of the petty bourgeois class, for example, auto drivers, switched to the Kejriwal persona that seemed palpably more intimate and more quotidian in its temperament and quality of touch. Continue reading Victory in Delhi
