The sweeping victory of the aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Delhi state election, winning 67 of the 70 seats in the legislative assembly in early February, signals a tectonic shift in Indian politics. The BJP which won a spectacular victory in the General Election of May last year, was reduced to three seats while the 130-year-old Congress Party scored a round duck.
These dramatic electoral victories and reverses indicate that none of the leaders of the major political parties which continue to practice traditional vote bank politics, adequately understand that the ground has shifted hugely beneath their feet.
For one, with post-independence India’s family planning (birth control) programme having failed due to the criminal neglect of primary education in the Centrally planned Indian economy, the country’s demographic profile has changed significantly, with contemporary India grudgingly hosting the world’s youngest and most short-changed electorate. Secondly, because of sustained neglect of agriculture, education, and socio-economic reform in rural India, there’s been continuous migration of impoverished peasants into the country’s overcrowded and insanitary urban habitats. And third, during the past decade the world’s most populous democracy served by 70,000 newspapers and magazines, 100 television news channels and 875 million mobile telephone connections, has experienced an unprecedented information explosion.
These new socio-economic realities explain the high volatility of voter behaviour in recent elections which has resulted in dramatic reversals of electoral fortunes of the country’s numerous political parties, including AAP, which, it may be recalled, received a drubbing in General Election 2014 in which it contested 432 seats countrywide and won only four.
Now that the party has clearly been forgiven by the electorate for its 49-day disastrous governance of Delhi last year, and endowed with an overwhelming mandate not only to govern Delhi state but also to put its house in order and practice new politics in step with the temper of the times, it’s important the party’s leadership doesn’t misinterpret its mandate and revert to practising populist freebies politics, which ruined the Congress party.
The leadership of this fledgling party needs to be aware that in a country with a failed education system, its role is as much to educate the public as it is to govern with sincerity and transparency. The country’s youthful and ill-educated electorate needs to be tutored that the politics of vote-banks and hand-outs is a zero sum game in which instant gratification is nullified by persistent inflation.
If the AAP leadership misinterprets its miraculous second mandate, the party will be rejected as decisively as the BJP, which misread its General Election 2014 mandate and paid a heavy price in the Delhi state election.
Electorate’s message to BJP leadership
Nine months after it stormed to power in New Delhi following the 2014 General Election on the strength of its promise to re-fire India’s stalled engines of economic growth, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads a coalition of 28 parties at the Centre, seems intent on realising the worst fears of liberal academics and the intelligentsia. Fringe elements of the sangh parivar — a coalition of Hindu revivalist organisations headed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological and cultural parent of the BJP — are chipping away at the fundamental rights and freedoms conferred by the Constitution upon all citizens of India, and religious minorities in particular.
On February 13, the new BJP-appointed chief of the Censor Board of Film Certification suo motu issued a list of 28 English and Hindi swear words which will be proscribed in films and television. On February 22, RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat felt it incumbent upon him to opine that the late Nobel laureate Mother Teresa (1910-1997), universally revered as a saint for her services to the diseased and destitute in the appalling slums of Kolkata, was driven by the hidden motive of converting the sick and destitute to Christianity.
These are only the latest examples of extremist, majoritarian viewpoints voiced by leading lights of the sangh parivar and often by newly-elected BJP members of Parliament. Among the voices of writers and intellectuals suppressed by majoritarian lynch mobs are of Tamil writer Perumal Murugan, forced to withdraw his novel Mathorubhagan, and Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai, forcibly deplaned at Delhi airport to prevent her from testifying before British MPs about the damage inflicted to indigenous tribes by a proposed project of Essar, a London-based company. Curiously, the BJP leadership in Delhi and the state capitals is maintaining a deafening silence about the anti-minorities utterances and frequent atrocities perpetrated by sangh parivar extremists, which are spreading fear and alarm within the country’s minorities.
Although the BJP top brass driven by simpleton majoritarian arithmetic seems unaware, there’s growing resentment of its double speak. A rising number of people have begun to see through its strategy of harvesting votes through divisive hindutva rhetoric spouted by sangh parivar members, while the party leadership beats the economy development drum to entice the middle class. The rejection of BJP double-speak was spectacularly manifested in the Delhi state election of February 7, where it has been reduced to three seats in the state assembly.
The trouncing of BJP by the revived Aam Aadmi Party reflects the disillusionment of the urban middle class and youth with the Janus-faced politics of the BJP leadership which seems to be sympathetic to the inflammatory and crude majoritarian politics being practiced by the RSS and its affiliate organisations. The message of India’s urban youth and middle class to prime minister Narendra Modi and the BJP is that it’s not enough the economy is doing well and foreign investor confidence is high. Social, cultural and intellectual freedoms are as important and the basic structure of the Constitution needs to be respected.