VIEWPOINT
AMITABH SHUKLA
As the country inches towards the
Lok Sabha polls, Aam Aadmi Party has clearly emerged as the joker in the pack
after its dramatic and well scripted exit from Delhi .
Whatever Congress and BJP say and do in the national Capital, they are clearly
a step behind the maverick Arvind Kejriwal.
No one for sure knows what the
next step of AAP would be and this is why it remains an untested commodity in
the Lok Sabha polls even though it had a questionable outing in governance for
49 days.
The other day, there was an
opinion poll by Times Now-CVoter clearly suggesting that Narendra Modi will be
the next NDA-led coalition’s Prime Minister. But the opinion poll was conducted
before Kejriwal resigned as Delhi Chief Minister. The stock of Kejriwal has
risen after his dramatic resignation and his success in making the people
believe that a new style of politics is in the horizon.
Had Kejriwal gone to the Lok
Sabha polls with the baggage of chief ministership of Delhi ,
his party’s fate would have been miserable. Now that there is a small halo of
martyrdom on his head… I resigned to fight corruption, I resigned as the
entrenched parties did not want a Jan Lokpal Bill passed, I resigned because I
took on Mukesh Ambani etc… Kejriwal could go to the polls with a fresh slate of
being a fighter against the “well entrenched corrupt system”. This is what many
say is the new avatar of the angry young man of Indian politics in the year
2014.
So resigning from chief
ministership was a political masterstroke of AAP and its boss Kejriwal. Even
the ardent admirers of AAP would admit that like Mamata Banerjee in West
Bengal , it would take a long time to transform AAP into a party of
Governance as it is more suited for agitations, rabble rousing and protest.
This is what keeps the party and its support base going and if it comes on the
eve of Lok Sabha polls, there could never be a better script. Moreover, no one would now bother to
scrutinise its performance and dramatics which unfolded before the people of Delhi
in the seven weeks in which it was in power. No one would even dub it as an
anarchist, urban Maoist outfit which has picked up the mike in the style of a
perfect demagogue instead of the gun to further its cause of gram swaraj and
mohalla sabha — styles of democracy practiced 600 years before Christ in
Vaishali.
A section of the urban middle
class might go with this confrontationist style of AAP for a while which only
has hype but no substance. This is the section which is also supporting
Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister and they would be faced with a dilemma now.
This section and even AAP support base was veering away to Modi after watching
the antics of Kejriwal. But they could find fresh virtues in the party after
the resignation of Kejriwal on a flimsy pretext and practically being defeated
on the floor of the Delhi Assembly on introduction of the Jan Lokpal Bill.
Kejriwal simply did not want to expose himself for long in Government lest he
got exposed and faced anti-incumbency.
Now that the burden of going to Players
Building
Coming back to the opinion poll
by Times Now-CVoter, the third or the fourth front, whatever you call it, are
getting 205-225 seats, 215 to be precise and this group includes AAP. This is
tantalisingly close to what NDA is expected to get. What if AAP surpasses all
predictions and does reasonably well after Kejriwal’s Delhi
dramatics and gets two dozen seats all over the country. Wouldn’t the Congress
think of pitching AAP and this front against NDA by offering its unconditional
support of 90 odd MPs it is expected to get in the 2014 polls? After all, it
was Congress which offered unconditional support to AAP in Delhi ,
facilitating the Government formation. Talk to Congress leaders about this
possibility and privately they are already looking at this scenario to keep
Narendra Modi and BJP out. So will Kejriwal be a 49-day Prime Minister as well?
Even as Congress supporters would
like to believe that, the scenario could be far-fetched. There is many a slip
between the cup and the lip. The opinion polls suggest that the gap between
Congress and BJP and NDA and UPA is widening consistently. They also show that
if AAP gains nationally, it could be at the cost of the Congress, BSP and also
the minuscule Left votes in some States.
Moreover, if one scrutinises the
composition of the 215 odd MPs who are likely to constitute the third or fourth
front, there are many parties who simply cannot be on the same side of the
fence, come what may. The number 215 comprises both SP and BSP who can never be
on the same side. This comprises Trinamool Congress and the Left Front, DMK and
AIADMK, Janata Dal (United) and RJD —parties which can never be together. The
entire politics of these parties is based on countering each other in the
States where they are dominant and if they are seen on the same side, they
would be finished in their States.
This so called anti-Congress and
anti-BJP regional parties are so diverse ideologically, temperamentally and as
per the realities at the grass roots in their respective States that they would
again divide with half of the 215 coming together for one cause while the other
half espousing some other cause. So this block of 215 is too fragmented with
many of them already looking at joining NDA and offering it unconditional
support if it was at a striking distance of forming Government. BJD in Odisha,
TMC in West Bengal , AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, and TDP in
Andhra Pradesh have all been a significant part of the NDA in the not so
distant past and they would find little merit in staying out of a grand
anti-Congress platform under Modi’s stewardship.
The latest opinion poll also
suggests a major rise in the NDA’s vote share, from 26 per cent in 2009 to 36
per cent with UPA’s down from 36 to 22 per cent. This gives NDA around 230
seats and UPA around 100 seats. The gap is too huge for the UPA to play any
meaningful role in the next Government formation.
Coming back to Kejriwal and AAP,
they are at best looking at the next Assembly polls in Delhi ,
possibly to be held along with the Lok Sabha polls. There is little doubt that
AAP is the new regional party of Delhi
and will stay there like DMK and AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and TMC in West
Bengal , squeezing the Congress and carving out a support base for
itself on the ruins of the grand old party. (February 17, 2014)
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