Kejriwal says AAP will win 100 seats: Bravado after Mumbai's tepid response?

It is indeed unfortunate that the visuals of Arvind Kejriwal being mobbed, first on board a local train and then soon after he alighted, will be the lasting images of his maiden visit to Mumbai. Because drumming up a crowd is easier in Mumbai, with its unforgiving population densities and its love for a good spectacle, than in many other cities. And a local train and the Churchgate railway station are a poor bellwether of support for anybody wanting to gather a mob. Daily footfalls in Churchgate station are in the vicinity of 14 lakh. And, as the AAP members have taken pains to point out, the scrum at the exit of the station comprised mostly media personnel, alongside AAP volunteers. Not spontaneous mobs of crusading Mumbaiites scrambling for a sight of their hero. That’s why the Aam Aadmi Party convenor’s statement at a ‘mahasabha’ in suburban Mumbai later on Wednesday evening is easy to dismiss as empty bravado, or misleading political speak. Here is what he said: “How many seats will we win this election, they ask me. I say whatever the tally, it’ll certainly be more than the Congress’s…” Going by what he had seen through the day, he continued, he believes AAP can win 100 Lok Sabha seats. “And if this wave continues,” he said, there is a possibility of an Aap Ki Sarkaar. [caption id=“attachment_143290” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Winning 100 seats? Cartoon by KN Balraj[/caption] Point out that the trends show otherwise, and the refrain of AAP volunteers is now predictable: The media has been bought over, the survey pundits sold their souls and nobody correctly predicted the Delhi Assembly outcome anyway. But there was a definite AAP wave in Delhi and while their 100 seats may be coming from elsewhere in the country, Kejriwal’s first set of roadshow-rallies in Mumbai was nowhere near a mega success. They gathered a crowd of a few thousand, not more than 6,000 people even at the best attended rally in the evening, in the north-central suburb of Vikhroli. Around 7 pm at the Kannamwar Nagar bus depot ground in Vikhroli (East), the announcers chided the gaggle of men gathered around the stage: “Please, go sit down. You keep standing here and the media reports that the venue is empty, the chairs are not taken.” At some later point, the emcee would tut-tut: “You won’t even listen to Kejriwalji? Go sit down.” There are 250 people gathered around the stage, she lamented. There weren’t. The truth is this: The response to the speeches in Vikhroli ranged from tepid to good, never outstanding. The response to the roadshow was lukewarm: A couple of hundred people at every stop does not total up to several thousand. The traffic chaos on Ghatkopar-Mankhurd Link Road is no benchmark – the Kejriwal cavalcade arrived at 5.30 pm, just as the evening rush hour began. And honestly, the jam was one you navigated your way out of in about 10 minutes, not more. Barring Kejriwal himself and the local candidate from the Mumbai North East constituency Medha Patkar, the remaining speeches at the Kannamwar Nagar ground were a blip on the radar for all but the kaaryakartas in the front rows. Mayank Gandhi, candidate from the Mumbai north-west constituency, would have been sorely disappointed at the response he got. He promised a 50 percent cut in electricity tariff for those using up to 100 units per month. Even more rashly, he promised 450 sq ft carpet area homes for slumdwellers, with “two bathrooms and two bedrooms”. It should have been an emotive point for even the fence sitters in the crowd who came out of curiosity. Kannamwar Nagar and areas around are home to a a series of redevelopment projects, old chawl buildings and crumbling housing board structures, all occupying prime real estate not even 20 km from the heart of central Mumbai,  squatting on land adjoining the wide Eastern Express Highway. Still, the cheers didn’t bring the house down. Nashik candidate Vijay Pandhare, a true hero and the main whistleblower in Maharashtra’s multi-crore irrigation scam, spoke in to a studied silence. Several thousand crores worth of projects are pending, more thousands of crores worth of projects are being added, the horsepower you are talking about is several hundred times the power of a typical farm genset… The only thing Pandhare established is that the irrigation scam is a non-issue among Mumbai’s voting public. The only other speaker to be showered with catcalls and whistles was Nandu Madhav, AAP’s candidate from Beed district. Madhav is the hero of Marathi film Harischandrachi Factory, a 2009 film that depicted Dadasaheb Phalke’s struggles in the making of India’s first feature film, a film that was sent to the Oscars as India’s entry in the foreign language film category. Madhav, who played Phalke, won loud applause in the 120 seconds he spoke. “I was asked to contest against a big man in Maharashtra politics. I asked if it was Munde. and I told them, Sunday ya Monday, Jhooth Bole Munde.” The distracted back-benches came alive, here was the entertainment they had come for. A good number of those who gathered were party workers from all over Mumbai. Then there were the stragglers who see Kejriwal on their television screens everyday and wanted a slice of the real thing, and the slum dwellers from Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, Mankhurd, Mandala, Annabhau Sathe Nagar, many of who joined the roadshow and came along till the rally venue. These are Mumbaiites who know and trust Medhatai. They form the Mumbai that Medha knows and understands well; she has worked with Mumbai’s slumdwellers for decades, sowing the seeds of peaceful rebellion against repeated demolitions long, long before India Against Corruption was a vague idea in Kejriwal’s mind. The support, in that sense, was for Patkar much more than for Kejriwal. Patkar’s speech was received very well. She acknowledged that there were people who weren’t responding to slogans because they had been drawn to the venue out of curiosity. They listened keenly as she spoke of her struggle against the government of Maharashtra’s move to let the Hiranandani builders off the hook despite the fact that they used land meant for the dishoused and for the lower income groups and economically weaker sections for plush apartment complexes where the smallest flats now cost upward of Rs 1.5 crore. Parts of these areas, where upper middle class Mumbaiites live in some of Mumbai’s fanciest lakefront paartments, are within her constituency. The differences between Kannamwar Nagar and Powai are stark. Kejriwal, expectedly, played to the galleries, repeating his now-familiar speech about Mukesh Ambani, Adani, various Congress ministers, corruption, scams and Narendra Modi. “There is no Modi wave,” he declared. He spoke at length about the media, which had by then taken up cudgels over the fracas and fallen metal detectors at Churchgate station. Little wonder then that the AAP’s insistence through Wednesday that there had been overwhelming support for Kejriwal in Mumbai was followed up with a press release that claimed the visit got “tumultous” response. Anybody who points out otherwise is, of course, paid media. The release suggested that there was misreporting of the chaos and that there were “pathetic attempts” to cover up the, once again, “tumultous support” Mumbaiites showed. Obviously, AAP is playing a game of perception, especially in a city like Mumbai where the India Against Corruption movement has deep roots, where at the height of the Anna movement it was not unheard of for a shout to randomly go up in a local train: “Bharat Mata ki… Jai.” (Mumbaiites who take the trains will confirm that the call most likely to get a lusty response in a Mumbai local is Ganpati Bappa… Morya.) Mumbai is also the city with the strongest AAP unit outside of Delhi. Volunteers are aplenty, the organisational structure is well defined, from mobilising support to raising funds there are experienced middle level AAP representatives who ease into their roles effectively. AAP’s hopes, and stakes, are somewhat higher in Mumbai  than in most places outside Delhi and Gurgaon. That explains the AAP volunteers’ insistence that the media is mischievous. But the plain truth is that barring Medha Patkar, AAP’s candidates in Mumbai stand no chance. The hundred seats Kejriwal said the party will win may not be just bravado, it might be a desperate ploy to talk themselves up.