ON 30 JULY, Shazia Ilmi and her campaign team crammed into a one-room office of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in RK Puram. Ilmi, who is one of the AAP’s 47 declared candidates, of a proposed total of 70, and will represent the RK Puram constituency in the Delhi Vidhan Sabha elections later this year, wanted to brief workers on a new campaign timetable. “We end up going to the same places too many times. This timetable should help us balance our visits,” she said to a group of volunteers and party workers.
Like many other AAP leaders, Ilmi is a former salaried professional. A television journalist for Star News, she quit her job in 2011 to join the agitation for the Lokpal Bill started by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal. Then a key member of Hazare’s core team, she now dedicates her time to the movement’s political successor, the AAP. As a new party aiming to build a campaign up from scratch, the AAP faces daunting challenges at every step. “We need to be organisationally strong,” Ilmi said. “Fighting the entrenched systems of existing parties makes such a challenge hard.”
In the middle-class colony of RK Puram’s Sector 5, Ilmi focused on the persona of the AAP’s leader. “Arvind Kejriwal was a government officer too,” she bellowed at people gathered in balconies and gardens. “If he wanted, he could have earned crores of rupees through illicit means. But he didn’t, because he is an honest man.” In adjacent slums, Ilmi faces a greater challenge in building support. “While most middle classes know Arvind Kejriwal, thanks to extensive coverage of him by the media,” she said, “there exists relatively little awareness of our movement in the slums.”
Paramdeep Sharma, a barber in Sonia Camp, a slum next to Sector 7, was forthright about how parties woo voters in his locality. “Votes are bought here,” he said. Sharma, who has lived at the slum for around 15 years, told me that, right before elections, party workers give alcohol and money to local acquaintances in the slums, who then distribute it to their caste associates and friends to “get the votes out”.
I accompanied Ilmi on her visit to Ekta Vihar, another RK Puram slum, situated next to the Sonia Camp. She began in a thicket of narrow lanes, meeting housewives washing clothes and shopkeepers selling snacks, and commiserating with them over the slum’s dilapidated conditions. She then made her way to a small courtyard towards the fringe of the slum and shouted, “Till when can you put up with this?” She railed against the local BJP councillor, Anil Sharma, who she said had sworn to send in a cleaner every week. Around 60 people gathered around her, some echoing her slogan of “Aam Aadmi zindabad!” In response to her entreaties, men—they were mostly men—promised that they would not take the booze or the money this time round. Children seemingly rejoiced in the festive nature of the proceedings.
But there was scepticism in the air, too. As Ilmi and her volunteers made their way out of the area through one of the many lanes, they came across women fighting over water dribbling from a tap. “If there has been no progress with respect to the sewers or water for 15 years,” one woman cried, “what magic can AAP do?”
Sometimes, the AAP faces more menacing resistance. Ilmi told me how, during one of her campaigning sprees in Bhavarsingh camp, a slum next to Vasant Vihar, “goons from Innovas” started bullying AAP party workers, and shouting down their voices. “Once,” she said, “the standoff became so ugly that I feared a riot might break out.”
Scared residents sometimes asked AAP members to leave, lest they attract more trouble. I asked Ilmi how she, or AAP, expected to get votes from slums where black money, bribery and other illicit methods have become essential to extracting votes. “Grassroot awareness,” she said. “We need to tell people the price they pay when they vote for Rs 500: the future, the education and the cleanliness they forgo when they fall for a bottle of booze.”