Aam aadmi’s last hope?

After the flurry of strip-tease revelations, Arvind Kejriwal has withdrawn to the shadows for the moment, overshadowed as he has been by the unprecedented outrage over the brutal rape of the 23-year-old girl on a Delhi bus.

But unlike his past mentor Anna Hazare, Mr Kejriwal deserves a hearing because he has formally stepped into political space and formed his Aam Aadmi Party. He is willing to stand up and be counted.
Mr Hazare’s movement had for a time a magical quality and forced a panicky government to deal with it as if it were the people’s tribune. But its excessive reliance on one remedy, an all powerful Lokpal above other democratic institutions, and the primitive ideas of its leader frittered away the great support it evoked from people frustrated with prevailing levels of corruption and the inability of the government to resolve basic problems.
Where Mr Hazare went wrong was that he sought to dictate solutions to the government, many of them naive, on the pre-Independence pattern of Mahatma Gandhi. But
Mr Hazare is no Gandhi and India has moved on more than 60 years after Independence. Mr Kejriwal grasped this contradiction and chose to break away to form a new political party.
There is an enormous amount of work to be done to give flesh to the bones of the Aam Aadmi Party. Since it cannot aspire to the kind of funding mainstream parties command, Mr Kejriwal resorted to the expedient of a revelation a day, carefully choreographed and timed for prime time television coverage to gather free publicity for himself and his party. He is to be commended for entering the political arena and be counted.
However, instead of picking holes in the government and its activities — there are many holes to pick — Mr Kejriwal and his associates need to give a cogent set of policies, apart from its emphasis on integrity and probity. It is not enough to say that the new party wants a clean and honest government. The need is to convince the people that it has a set of ideas that will make a difference to governance.
In the initial phase, i.e., in the next general election, Aam Aadmi Party can only aspire to solitary victories for its candidates.
But it can serve as a ginger group and can build up enough of a presence in some constituencies to be wooed by mainstream parties because its supporters could make a difference to the fortunes of other candidates. These are early days yet as
Mr Kejriwal and his associates put their heads together to evolve a strategy.
The initial Hazare movement and the Aam Aadmi Party are healthy developments because they give voice to the people’s frustrations over how Indian politics has evolved.
It is no secret that although India has not followed the path of many other newly independent countries in seeking solace in authoritarian ways outside Indira Gandhi’s experiment with the Emergency in the 1970s, some ugly aspects of the Indian practice are blotting the copybook.
True, the Indian democratic system has empowered the lowly and weak as exemplified by the phenomena of the dalit-based Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party, but the patronage and often caste-based practices of political parties are an impediment to true democracy.
It is a given in a free-wheeling democracy that money power will play a role in contesting elections. And in as fractured a society as India’s with the background of Hindu-Muslim problems which led to the subcontinent’s Partition, communal equations play an important role.
Where the Aam Aadmi Party can help, if it takes off, is to make it more difficult for other parties to field tainted candidates by converting the turpitude and moral lapses of individuals into campaign issues. If the practice in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar for candidates with criminal records is to wear their doubtful credentials as badges of honour, Aam Aadmi Party can make the difference by driving home the nature of the criminal acts by publicising them far and wide. Perhaps it will not make a difference in their electoral fortunes, but it is an effort worth trying.
Apart from lifting the moral tone of electoral campaigns and seeking to win a few seats, what can the Aam Aadmi Party achieve?
If Mr Kejriwal and his team can convince enough voters of their integrity and competence, it could conceivably find a bigger role than that of a niche party.
Erasing caste and religious differences is an almost impossible task, but the party can conceivably become the flag-bearer of a new kind of politics that could show the way.
Given the context of the Hazare movement in which Mr Kejriwal was nurtured, the Aam Aadmi Party should resist the temptation of harking back to the past to chart out the country’s future. We are living in the 21st century and must adopt new modern technological and scientific progress to look to the future. The Hazare movement’s tendency to look back and rely on regressive and simplistic solutions to current and future problems is ostrich-like and regressive.
The secret of success will lie in marrying Indian traditions and idiom to the needs of a technological future. The conservative core of the Indian political spectrum represented by such parties and institutions as the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayansevak Sangh are, in a sense, an impediment to progress, seeking as they do hoary old solutions to solve new problems.
Politicians’ reactions to the outrage over the Delhi gangrape have been so bizarre and prejudiced as to defy logic. The Aam Aadmi Party must therefore steer clear of the Hazare cure for resolving the country’s problems. It remains to be seen whether the new party will have the strength to resist the home-spun homilies of Anna Hazare to progress to a relevant and modern view of India. For the present, it is a work in progress. One would hope that Mr Kejriwal will receive and accept sound advice from his associates and well-wishers of the ilk of the social scientist Yogendra Yadav to place the party on the right path.