Decoding AAP's candidate list: No party for aam aadmis

The Aam Aadmi Party loves to hate the establishment. But it also wants to coopt it. A glance through its eclectic list of candidates for the 2014 Lok Sabha election provides ample evidence. The best seats have gone to “khas aadmi”, not aam aadmis. Consider the choices for what are potentially the two most winnable Lok Sabha seats for the party – AAP could count of winning the New Delhi and Chandni Chowk seats if the Delhi assembly election voting pattern were to reproduce itself.

Neither Ashutosh, nor Ashish Khetan, are from the traditional activist core of the party. They are journalists, who spent long stretches of their careers working for the “establishment”, the very same “corporate” and “biased” media AAP rants against. Odd then that AAP should opt to give its most winnable tickets to such recent anti- establishment converts. Of course, the duo isn’t the only one time mainstream journalist in AAP – Manish Sisodia, Delhi’s former education minister, Shazia Ilmi, the party’s articulate spokesperson and Jarnail Singh, the shoe thrower (the Lok Sabha candidate from West Delhi) also worked in the media.

For all its anti-establishmentarianism, AAP is littered with those from the establishment. How else would you classify Meera Sanyal, the former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland in India and now AAP’s candidate from South Mumbai? Or V Balakrishnan, the former CFO of Infosys, the party’s candidate from Bangalore Central? Were they not, until recently, part of the same corporate set up which AAP blames for the ills of India?

Yudhvir Singh Khayalia, the party’s candidate from Hisar is a former IAS officer who wasn’t in the rebellious Ashok Khemka mode. He was very much an establishment man who succeeded the troublesome Khemka after one of his many transfers. Yogendra Yadav and Anand Kumar (the party’s candidates from Gurgaon and North East Delhi) are mainstream academics. Yadav was, until not long ago, an adviser and mentor to the Congress’ Rahul Gandhi.

What is clear is that AAP is desperately keen to bring different parts of the establishment on board. It has even resorted to a touch of Congress-style dynasty by giving the East Delhi ticket (another winnable seat) to Rajmohan Gandhi’s whose main qualification for the ticket is that his grandfather was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the one politician all parties, new and old want to invoke.

It doesn’t matter that AAP’s coopted establishment has conflicting views. Journalist Khetan rants against corporates. His corporate colleagues rant against the bureaucracy. Their bureaucratic colleagues rant against the politicians. The politicians (a la Kejriwal) want rant against journalists. At some point, there is bound to be a horrific collision.

The only common thread is that some of these “establishment” candidates have good name recognition. They bring with their ‘star’ qualities, instant coverage in the media, so crucial for any political party.

AAP had promised that its candidates would be elected by American-style primaries. There haven’t been any open, transparent primaries to select these Lok Sabha worthies. AAP’s selection procedures are like any other party’s procedure, opaque and decided by a high command’s diktat. In the end, its candidates are as mainstream as any other party’s are and drawn from the same establishment pool.

There is only one difference. They apparently wear the halo of righteousness (above their headgear) handed out by that ultimate crusader, Arvind Kejriwal. In two months, we’ll find out whether it was visible to India’s voters.