Tale of two rallies: Kejriwal’s band baaja Vs Sheila’s snooze fest

New Delhi: From the hawaai jahaaj (airplane) if you look down at Delhi, you will just see hariyali hi hariyali (greenery and greenery), chief minister Sheila Dikshit tells a rather bemused crowd at an election meeting near Kashmere Gate in Delhi. Kapil Sibal’s wife, Promila, filling in for her husband, also has her head in the clouds. Delhi airport is so fabulous, she gushes. Gone are the days when she’d feel envious while traveling in London and Singapore and wonder why Delhi could not be like them. Did you know Delhi airport has won international awards, she tells the very non-jetsetting crowd which is clearly more interested in the food they have been promised at the end of the meeting. A rumour that the food is being served causes everyone to bolt in the middle of Mrs Sibal’s speech. [caption id=“attachment_124386” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Sheila Dikshit at the Kashmere Gate rally. Naresh Sharma / Firstpost[/caption] “They seem to pay no attention to the things the medium class needs,” rues Balkishen Singh, a tailor from Jumnabazar, and a Congress supporter. “Daily use-ke cheez (things) for us.” Not airports. Singh has bought two electricity-saver low voltage light bulbs because electric bills are so high. He tucks one into each sock so he does not lose them and shows me the three-year guarantee card they came with. “Parties make so many promises,” he laughs. “If only they had guarantee cards.” The Congress party’s meeting follows the script of an old-school political rally. Hifalutin speeches. Patriotic songs. Garlands. Boys shipped in from the madrasa to fill the chairs. Free Congress sashes and visors. The candidate cannot say two sentences without invoking “the chief minister of Delhi” as if she is a magic mantra. It all leads to rather lukewarm applause and half-hearted cheers on demand. That’s the paradigm that Arvind Kejriwal wants to disrupt with his Aam Aadmi Party campaign. He’s avoiding the big rally where his appeal will be measured by the crowd size. On the same day as Sheila Dikshit pops in to the Kashmere Gate meeting, Kejriwal takes his guerilla campaign into the heart of Delhi’s Janakpuri in a vehicle rally. In keeping with AAP’s carefully cultivated image, the rally has an air of rag-tag sincerity. Grey-bearded and bespectacled Vijay Baba in a grubby kurta pajama says he is a rickshaw-wallah who has joined AAP because he is sick of the rishwat (bribes) culture. 13 year-old Suraj says he is skipping school for three months to help with the campaign. “Don’t your parents object? Should you be doing this?” I ask. “I told my father what Bhagat Singh said,” Suraj replies without hesitation. “Desh se badhi koi padhai nahin hai (There is no study more important than the nation).” Kejriwal, festooned with marigold garlands, gives the same stump speech every five to ten minutes as his entourage moves through the streets. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he tells the crowd with his trademark earnestness, undimmed by repetition. By the grace of God, they can now vote for an imaandar (principled) party. If they let this opportunity slip, it won’t come again. Unlike the Congress rally there’s genuine curiosity in the crowds for the newcomer as the vehicle rally plunges through streets crowded with hardware stores, ladies suits shops and the Fancy Men’s Salon, past carts selling pomegranates and apples, over canals clogged with garbage. Kejriwal says the big parties will come to them with money and alcohol on election-eve. Manaa nahin karna, take the money, he says (keeping mum about the alcohol) but vote on the AAP’s broom on December 4. He says 8 out of 10 people he meets tell him they will vote for AAP. Babita, standing by her makeshift shanty on a muddy stretch of the road, brushing her hair, says she’s not convinced. He’s a first time candidate. Who knows if he will help or f*** us over. But when an AAP volunteer runs up with a handful of marigolds and rose petals she laughingly agrees to shower Kejriwal with them. “Aap hi ka aashirwaad,(Your blessings)” the man says ingratiatingly. She puts her green comb aside and tosses the flowers with good aim at Kejriwal. But then she grins and says it’s just flowers, not a vote. Yet. Just as Sarojini Naidu said it took a lot to keep Gandhiji poor, it takes a lot of planning to keep the Aam Aadmi party looking like a spontaneous popular outburst of the small-A aam aadmis. A woman tells me the Aam Aadmi gave her the broom with which she is high-fiving another woman. “I don’t know if they will take it back at the end,” she says. Volunteers run ahead pressing flowers into people’s hands for some “spontaneous” floral enthusiasm. There’s a machine planted every few blocks to project petals out at high speed from a kind of hose so that it makes for a pretty picture of a candidate being showered with flowers. What is it called, I ask the man feverishly feeding petals out of a cement sack into the bowels of the machine. “Flower machine,” he says, looking at me as if I am an imbecile. There is good reason to gently stage-manage the popular buzz for a populist party. AAP has to walk that delicate balance of keeping its underfunded underdog status alive but it cannot be so underdog that it’s not seen as a credible alternative to the mainstream bigwigs it is challenging for power. There is some nervousness among some of its supporters. AAP is being attacked with sting operations and stories of rifts and misused funds. Sapna is worried that Anna Hazare seems to be complaining about his shishya Arvind. “Arvind is like the Hanuman to Anna-ji. I don’t know why Anna-ji is being like this today.” After all Ram, she reminds me, also needed his Hanuman. Sheila Dikshit’s rallies, in contrast, have the studied, if rather matronly calm of the confidence of the establishment in contrast to AAP’s nervous energy. Mohammad Gholam, a gold worker, says he will back the Congress because it’s a majboot (sturdy) party, not an upstart like AAP. But Kejriwal is counting on people like Umesh Paswan, a restaurant manager in Janakpuri. He says he is a “Congress-i” but he likes Kejriwal because he does not have greed for money. Sheila Dikshit is fine, he says, but Kejriwal speaks the right language of development for “the youths”. Even if his manifesto is full of expensive promises of 50 percent electric bill reduction and free water, in a congested market lane those feel more relevant to Paswan than Dikshit’s dreams of double-decker flyovers. Led by four horses and the rather garish Pal marching band, in red jackets, golden jodhpurs and white boots, AAP’s rally feels like a cross between a tacky wedding baraat procession and an earnest family planning or dengue eradication public awareness campaign. At the Mangalpuri bus terminal, the marching band, hot and bothered, finally stops. The drummer has been trotting with his drum on his head to keep pace with the jeeps and CNGs. Trumpet player Saddam says for processions like these they probably get 10-12,000 rupees. Weddings can pay 20-25000 instead. But we don’t have to walk this much he says. “When will this job end?” he complains on the phone to the manager. “Gaari toh jaah hi rahen hain, jaah hi rahen hain (the cars just keep going and going).” That perhaps is what Kejriwal is hoping for in the end. Off the streets, AAP is facing sting operations showing some of its leaders taking money without receipts in complete contradiction to its leader’s moustache-quivering righteousness. No matter what comes in the way of stings and exposes as election day nears, Kejriwal wants to just keep pushing on, with or without the marching band.