By M Reyaz, TwoCircles.net,
22 year old Saransh Jain is originally from Mumbai and has only few months back come back from USA after completing his course to become commercial pilot. Vansmita is originally from Guwahati, Assam, but is doing PhD in Political Science from the University of Delhi. There seems nothing common between the two, except that they both have taken break from their usual routine to ‘volunteer’ for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
The sight of any rally of Aam Aadmi Party was a welcome change from mundane political rallies of our politician prototypes, where former history sheeters, bahu-balis, heavy weights of the locality, clerics and Sadhus, or the down trodden comprise the majority of the people. The few educated people that you would find are either on the dais, politicians themselves or their sons and daughter, or very hard core comrades and party workers.
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The Gandhi cap (with AAP slogans) wearing AAP volunteers as well as activists cum leaders look different from the word go. Most of them do not spot the traditional white Kurta Payjama with black bandi, and they all are young, educated youth, often from middle class families. Voluntarily and ‘selflessly’ they have all come forward and joined hands to “change the fate of the country.” And for them Delhi is the beginning and not an end!
While almost all the opinion polls, have accepted that there is “AAP wave” and most are even speculating that they will emerge as king maker at least, even if they don’t get to form the government. AAP’s latest internal survey, however, says that they will win 38-50 seats, and thus will form the government with comfortable majority in the 70 members Delhi Assembly.
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As people are voting today, only on December 8 we will tell the fate of AAP, or as Arvind Kejriwal and their other leaders want to put it, “the fate of the country.”
I may have my reservations to the political future of AAP, largely because the way I see it, most their supporters and volunteers are centre right, although leaders like Prashant Bhushan and Yongendra Yadav have socialist leanings. That is, most of the supporters of AAP could also be the catchment voters for Narendra Modi.
Professor Yogendra Yadav, AAP leader and a core strategist, tried to shun fear from Muslim minds in an interview to TCN. He said that the AAP is “trying to move beyond two kinds of politics that dominate any discussion on the Muslim question towards a third kind of politics which moves beyond pseudo-nationalism and this completely bankrupt form of secularism which being practiced.”
“We want to practice the politics which lives up to the Constitutional ideals of secularism in true spirits and letter and that would mean addressing specific concerns of the Muslim community without appealing to the communal feeling,” Yadav, who is a Senior Fellow at CSDS, had told this Correspondent.
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From Babarpur in North East Delhi to Batla House, people are now demanding netas, with cleaner images, corruption once again has become the fulcrum of political discussions, and that clearly is a positive sign.
As Manoj Kumar, a resident of Babrpur told me during one of the elections’ Jan-Sampark meeting, “I will try AAP this time. Leaders in the past have fooled us anyways, so even if AAP fools us, it’s fine. I won’t let those old chaps fool us at least this time.”
AAP does not just appear idealist, but also radical in their approach. In Babarpur, for example where lower class Muslims comprise almost half of population, they did not shy away from fielding Gopal Rai, one of their strongest candidate. And judging by crowd he has been able to gather I won’t be surprised if he wins. Similarly, Shazia Ilmi, former TV News Anchor and another star candidate of AAP is contesting from RK Puram, with negligible Muslim population.
Further, barring few, most of their candidates are not popular faces even in their own constituencies, many had not heard their names a year earlier. In such a scenario, I am afraid, they will end up being more of spoiler than winners. But the buzz they have been successful in creating around AAP in itself is an achievement for a party launched only a year ago and with maximum of their candidates contesting elections for the first time.
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JDU candidate from Okhla Shoaib Danish with Bihar CM Nitish Kumar and JDU Rajya Sabha MP Sabir Ali during an election rally in Okhla.
During my interactions with several AAP volunteers, they often asked me, ‘If you accept that AAP has been successful in creating a kind of “wave,” why not accept that we may also win?’ And I replied to them that experiences show and as I have heard, none other than Yogendra Yadav, often pointing to the fact that “In India people don’t cast their votes, they vote their castes.”
In all the flutter over corruption, my only scepticism is that has our democracy evolved so much that voters will rise above caste, class, religion, regionalism, etc. After all it is not for anything that Bihar’s chief minister campaigned for JDU candidates in Purvanchal dominated regions, and the Congress invited five of its present and former CMs from Oomen Chandy of Kerala (in pockets with Malyali population) to Bhupinder Singh Hooda of Haryana (in Jat dominated regions), former Punjab CM Amrinder Singh (in Sikh dominated regions), Uttarakhand CM Vijay Bahuguna and Himachal Pradesh CM Virbhadra Singh in their respective Pahari population. BJP of course has its own star campaigner Narendra Modi, who too has been gathering crowd. If crowd alone is the parameter, the political arena still appears as chaotic!
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Having said that, one cannot ignore the fact that from the beginning of the anti-corruption movement that later galvanised into a political party, Arvind Kejriwal and his ilks have forced the political class of the country to introspect, and have changed the whole political discourse.
I am not sure if this election is so crucial to decide the fate of the country, but coming Sunday will surely decide the fate of the movement that began with the fast of Anna Hazare over two years back. Come Sunday and we shall know if the experiment of ‘civil society’ directly participating in electoral politics, thus blurring the distinction between the two, was simply a movement of few idealists, or the Aam Aadmi’s(people’s) non-violent movement for better governance!