#AAPSweepingDelhi: What Arvind Kejriwal is doing right

As heads got together, rolled and shook at intervals contemplating the fortunes of a ten-month-old party in a television channel debate, a hashtag made its way into the top trends list on Twitter India and perched pretty on it. The hashtag in question is #AAPSweepingDelhi. While political parties seem to have elbowed Bollywood out of Twitter in the run-up to the 2014 general elections, this particular hashtag embodies the general sentiment around Arvind Kejriwal’s party and is perfectly in line with the vocabulary being employed to relate its ‘success story’. ‘Sweep’, ‘wave’, ’tide’ and a lot of other words that signify the impressive breadth of a phenomenon have been generously used to describe the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). It’s pure coincidence that the AAP’s symbol is the jhadu (broom) which the party uses as the symbol for cleansing the system of its malaise. [caption id=“attachment_1203571” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] ![Kejriwal is set to take a chunk out of both the Congress and BJP: Reuters](https://images.firstpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/arvind-kejriwal-reuters.jpg) Kejriwal is set to take a chunk out of both the Congress and BJP: Reuters[/caption] The Election Tracker debate on CNN IBN, which analysed the results of a pre poll survey for the upcoming Delhi election, saw the panelists, each from different professional backgrounds and vastly different political philosophies, agree unanimously that Arvind Kejriwal is a force to reckon with. Twenty-eight percent of the 2507 voters that the survey covered in Delhi, said that they are willing to vote for AAP. Compare this to Congress’ 27 percent and BJP’s 29 percent, and it’s evident that Kejriwal’s party has made more than just a dent on the big shark’s vote-share. In fact, the survey revealed that people who choose to vote for BJP, think that Arvind Kejriwal is a fitting chief minister for Delhi. Right wing columnist Swapan Dasgupta attributed AAP’s ‘spectacular’ debut to his sheer enthusiasm and energy - and this comes from a man who has never been at a loss of words in praising the BJP’s PM candidate Narendra Modi’s charisma and importance in the national political narrative. So what has Arvind Kejriwal done right? Even Kejriwal’s biggest fans will admit that his was a story that seemed that hurtling towards doom at lightning speed. An offshoot of a anti-corruption movement that died a rather undignified death and disappeared into oblivion, Kejriwal didn’t even have the blessings of his mentor Anna Hazare. When Anna Hazare distanced himself from his party, the media didn’t lose a second to point its finger at a man with political ambitions - ambitions that the non-politically active voting population is conditioned to treat with suspicion. Politics of rabble rousing, politics of hit-and-run allegations, politics of attention grabbing, politics of picking fights that aren’t followed through - Kejriwal was accused of getting the very ABC’s of politics wrong. From Nitin Gadkari to Salman Khurshid, everyone dismissed Kejriwal as the starry-eyed upstart leeching on their respective parties’ reputation to seek his 15 minutes of television fame. The same Kejriwal, a CNN IBN survey now shows is Delhi’s most preferred chief ministerial candidate. Statistics show that he has eaten away the corners of the Congress party’s Muslim voting fabric, he is a favourite with the BJP voting upper classes, he is a favourite with the lower classes and the poor. He is a favourite with the young voting populace of Delhi and he is the chief minister that even BJP voters want. Now what explains this all consuming wave that Kejriwal seems to have sparked? Why has the capital of a country whose other poll surveys have been swept by Narendra Modi given a rousing thumbs up to someone with zero experience in politics, forget governance? The answer lies with Congress and BJP in Delhi and their public discourse - both of which are mothballed, predictable, low on self assessment and can be frankly vicious at times. While the older party’s ‘we-will-win’ audacity reeks of arrogance, Kejriwal’s ‘we’ll-sweep-the-polls’ is tinged with a bold, even if slightly juvenile tone of reassurance that weary voters wouldn’t mind romanticizing and hence experimenting with. Unlike say a Narendra Modi, who has entrenched himself in politics for decades now and is still playing the ‘outsider’, ’non-political elite’, ‘anti-nepotism’ card to strike a chord with voters, Arvind Kejriwal can rightfully stake claim to all those qualities. He literally, like he told CNN IBN, ‘came from nowhere’. While Narendra Modi’s travails are now part of political lore, Kejriwal’s story unfolded right before our eyes and survived our test of cynicism, doubt and cold dismissal while on its way up. And the man’s political rhetoric is on the upswing. Asked by CNN IBN’s editor Rajdeep Sardesai on who he thinks is a bigger adversary, BJP or Congress, Kejriwal replied, “Corruption.” Leaving his pointlessly noise-making days behind, Kejriwal is now smartly avoiding the Congress BJP slug-fest that must have turned most voters off by now. “No party is our enemy. Our enemy is corruption and dishonesty and we are fighting against it.” No secular-communal hand-wringing, no who’s-in-more-muck allegations. In fact when asked if opinion polls will translate into votes all all Kejriwal quipped was, “Last month your channel gave us 8 seats, now you’re giving us 25 seats. We must have done something right. If in one month we have improved that much, lets hope the momentum stays and we sweep the Delhi polls.” However, he shows a healthy amount of confidence which is undoubtedly required to make an impression in the political narrative of India and hints that he has his head right where it should be. “You never know what happens in the night before the polls. We don’t have money to pay for liquor. We will use our funds to fight for honesty and fight honestly,” he says. And with this, he takes on the older parties’ politics of arrogance and corruption with something that no seasoned politician would consider expressing in public. And that is doubt. He admits to doubt his own political fortunes to attack his opponents and comment on their malpractices. You cannot deny that as the telltale sign of intelligent politicking. He rounds up the interview saying, “Whatever the outcome, we’re here to stay.” Contrast this to BJP CM candidate’s Dr Harsh Vardhan’s short interview in the same show. The same time-worn ‘we will win because we have faith in our voters and the blessings of our seniors’. And of course the plug in for Narendra Modi. “We will win the Delhi elections and then with Narendra Modi ji we will win the Lok Sabha elections too.” “There was no fight over the CM candidate,” reiterated Dr Harsh Vardhan, whereas Kejriwal pointed out that everyone’s fighting over CM, PM candidature. “We asked Kiran Bedi to become our CM candidate. She declined saying she doesn’t want to become involved in active politics.” Ragini Nayak, the Congress spokesperson in the show, went two steps ahead and rubbished the survey saying such poll results say nothing about the real political trends in India. An EPW editorial from when AAP was formed points at calculated attempts at a strong political posturing in Kejriwal’s series of press conferences where he took on several bigwigs of several parties. While he was being routinely dismissed as being a mini-Mamata Banerjee, heedless and publicity hungry, he was actually manipulating the apathy and antipathy that the political classes and sections of mainstream media had towards him to reach out to his real targets -voters. The article states: There seems to be a method in the apparent madness of sequential press conferences carpet-bombing both the Congress and the BJP – whether it is against Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law, Robert Vadra, or BJP president Nitin Gadkari. The short-term tactic seems to be to capture public attention as well as hit the established parties, particularly the ruling Congress, such that their top leadership is exposed. Using media saturation tactics, the new political outfit has sought to convey the message that corruption in high places has become endemic, facilitated by the nexus between the top political parties and the corporate sector, and that the state institutions are incapable of addressing the issue. Kejriwal’s group seems to be saying that it will not be possible to take on institutionalised corruption without destroying the political capital and power base of the established parties. Kejriwal cannot afford to misappropriate the intelligence of his voters - their ability to form their own opinions from a rubble of opinions floating around them, their ability to read into manufactured political empathy, to tell tell rhetoric from reality. And if he wins, that would be called his winning move.

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#AAPSweepingDelhi: What Arvind Kejriwal is doing right

While the older party’s ‘we-will-win’ audacity reeks of arrogance, Kejriwal’s ‘we’ll-sweep-the-polls’ is tinged with a bold, even if slightly juvenile tone of reassurance that weary voters wouldn’t mind romanticizing and hence experimenting with.

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