Amit Kushari IAS Retd
After its grand performance in Delhi Assembly AAP is now eyeing the Lok Sabha seats in the whole of India where elections are due in April 2014. The newly born party was born out of Anna Hazare’s movement for honest administration and it succeeded in winning 28 out of 70 seats in Delhi. Arvind Kejriwal was sworn in as the Chief Minister with the external support of the Congress. The biggest party, BJP, with 32 seats was forced to sit out in the cold because it did not get any external support.
All the leaders of AAP are Delhi based people speaking Hindi. They do not have leaders from different parts of India speaking different languages and that is surely a disadvantage for them. They could perhaps penetrate a little bit by moving into Haryana and Western UP…but that is perhaps the maximum that they could do. There is hardly any vacant political space anywhere. The voters of BJP are usually committed, indoctrinated voters and it is unthinkable that many of them would ditch Narendra Modi. Even in Delhi the AAP voters had indicated in large numbers that in Lok Sabha elections they would vote for Narendra Modi as PM. The recent voting pattern indicates that 5 out of the 7 Lok Sabha seats in Delhi would go to BJP and 2 would go to AAP. In actual Lok Sabha elections all the 7 seats could go to BJP since AAP voters would also vote for the lotus symbol. AAP,however may get some Muslim votes in UP because the Muslims there have lost faith in the Samajwadi party, to a large extent and they may not feel confident to vote for the Congress because there is a general perception that Congress is a sinking ship and may not be able to protect Muslims effectively.
As far as non Hindi states are concerned the political space is firmly divided between regional parties and it will be extremely difficult for AAP to gate crash into these areas in the absence of tall leaders from these areas in AAP. Even BJP has so far not succeeded in entering these non Hindi areas, in spite of their best efforts. In Kolkata, AAP took out a procession of young men and women but that procession hardly had four or five hundred volunteers, mostly Hindi speaking settlers from Bihar and Rajasthan. Hardly any Bengali volunteer was seen. Even the name of the party ( Aam Aadmi) does not strike a chord in the heart. Most people think that ‘AAM’ means ‘mango’. Very few people know that in Hindi/Urdu ‘AAM’ means ‘common’. In Bengal I have to explain to many people that this word ‘AAM’ is an urdu word which starts with the alphabet ‘ayen’ and the word ‘aam’ for mango, starts with the alphabet ‘alif’. For the Hindi speaking man it will be very difficult to comprehend this difficulty because the word ‘aam’ is used very frequently for ‘common’ in day to day parlance. If the party had been named ‘Jan Sadharan Party it would have found greater acceptance in non Hindi areas. The name itself makes ‘AAP’ a regional party of north India.
Even in north India there are strong parties like Bahujan Samaj Party which have well defined contours in the political space. It will not be easy for AAP to snatch votes from BSP. They cannot snatch votes from the Akali Dal either, since the Sikhs are solidly with that party. They can only damage Congress votes in Haryana and Punjab and that would only help parties like INLD, Akali Dal and BJP. Bengal, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are very strong fortresses of regional parties and AAP simply cannot penetrate into these areas. They could try their luck in Karnataka, however. Kumar Vishwas is going to contest against Rahul Gandhi in Amethi. It is doubtful whether he has a good chance of winning. The Gandhi family is too well entrenched in these small pocket boroughs. However one does not know really. David had also killed Goliath. The Congress party and the Gandhi family has real reasons to worry. As if Narendra Modi was not enough, Congress has to face another rival in AAP in quite a few areas of north India.
(The author is former Financial Commissioner Feedback to the author at 09748635185 or amitkus@hotmail.com )
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