The bankruptcy of the Rahul Congress

As the results of the Delhi election began to come in, two things became clear. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s dedication to organisation and detail in its campaign, well documented in a recent piece in The Caravan, had prevailed. But the Aam Aadmi Party was not a spent force. It had fought a close battle, exceeding the vote share predictions of even the more optimistic opinion polls. Yet, strangely, the party that seemed happiest with the results was the Congress, which won no seats, as well as the coterie of upper-caste liberals—mostly Hindu, some Muslim—who effectively run the party’s organisational machinery from Delhi’s drawing rooms.

The Congress had done enough to ensure the AAP’s defeat. Many of its candidates had acted as spoilers, such as Sandeep Dikshit, whose third-place finish resulted in Arvind Kejriwal’s defeat in the New Delhi constituency. But the very fact that the party saw this as an achievement sums up its state—here was a national party celebrating an act that directly benefitted its main political opponent, the BJP.

It is not as if the AAP government or the party was without its problems. The charge against the AAP is twofold. The first is detailed in another piece in this issue of The Caravan that focusses on the party’s blindness towards caste, which has led to considerable dissatisfaction among Dalits, who, at one time, supported the party. The roots of this lie in Kejriwal’s own disdain for reservations and affirmative action, which was visible in his early days as an anti-reservation activist. It was a viewpoint that was present among almost the entire early AAP leadership, such as the lawyer Prashant Bhushan who, in recent years, has oppposed reservations in the higher judiciary. Quite apart from the injustice inherent in any such view, it also reflects a failure to understand Indian social reality. It is no coincidence that the AAP has had success in two states—Punjab and Delhi—where the interplay of varna and jati, which defines much of Indian politics, was not, until this election, the overwhelming force driving voter mobilisation.

The second is the AAP’s dalliance with Hindutva. The party, from its inception, has never had a clear view on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the organisation’s attempt to remould Hinduism in its rabid image, at the core of which lies the belief that Muslims and Christians cannot be equal citizens in the imagined Hindu Rashtra. When the India Against Corruption movement, which gave rise to the AAP, was at its peak, in the early 2010s, there was considerable overlap with the RSS in terms of support base. The views of the deluded patron saint of the movement, Anna Hazare, explain the ease with which the RSS was ready to come to his support. He was Gandhian only in his intolerance of alcohol but believed that “along with Gandhi we have to look towards Shivaji.” He spoke approvingly of how, to punish a man, “Shivaji had the man’s hands cut off.” He said, “This policy of Chhatrapati, in many ways, we have to think about.”