AAP’s 2015 victory a flash in the pan?

The results of the three municipal corporations of Delhi – North Delhi, East Delhi and South Delhi – are a wakeup call for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Just two years ago, in February 2015, AAP had created a record, and captured the nation’s imagination, by winning 67 of the 70 seats to the Legislative Assembly of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, sweeping aside all parties. The Bharatiya Janata Party had won the remaining three seats, while Congress that had been in power in Delhi earlier had not won a single seat in that election. The victory had positioned AAP, as an alternative to the Congress and the BJP, and its leader Arvind Kejriwal as a possible future Prime Minister, an ambition that Kejriwal has never denied nursing.

Somewhere since February 2015 the AAP dream has faltered very badly. In fact, the Delhi 2015 Assembly election is the only one that the party has ever won. Last month, when the votes polled for the Punjab and Goa Assembly elections were counted, AAP that that hoped to form a government in the former and make a mark in the latter, found itself on the losing side. In Punjab it won just 20 seats in the 117-member Assembly, and in Goa, where it fielded candidates in 39 constituencies, it failed to open its account, with many of its nominees faring so badly that they had to forfeit their deposits. Goa, which is more cosmopolitan in nature, was the testing ground for AAP’s programmes, policies and campaign styles. The party failed here, slipped in Punjab and has now lost ground in Delhi. What went wrong, even AAP leaders have been left wondering.

While some AAP leaders have offered to quit party posts accepting responsibility for the debacle, AAP leader Ashutosh made a relevant point when he said, “It’s difficult to digest that despite halving electricity rates, giving water for free, improving schools and hospitals, people haven’t voted for AAP.” AAP made similar promises in Goa and these didn’t appear to have attracted the electorate. That doling out freebies does not result into votes, is something that even BJP realised when the results of the Goa polls came in, and the party at internal meetings later admitted that giving jobs and introducing schemes that put money into people’s pockets did not convert into votes and result in an election victory. In this aspect, it is obvious that the electorate wants more than freebies from the government, it wants a better quality of life and that is what the parties across the spectrum need to realise.

AAP, however, cannot be entirely ruled out as a potent political party, not yet. Everybody knows that the BJP won just two seats in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections, and how in the following years it grew to reach a simple majority of its own in the Lok Sabha in 2014. It took the party 30 years to achieve that, though it formed governments with the support of other parties before that.

AAP needs to remain politically relevant if it wants to be taken seriously as a party that can challenge the BJP and the Congress in the country. It would perhaps have to reinvent itself and stop playing the victim, claiming, as it is currently doing, that the EVMs have been tampered with. The long term is what AAP should be looking at, instead of finding excuses for the short term losses. A political party has to be considered as a project of at least 20 years. For now, the 2015 Delhi win for AAP remains a flash in the pan, but if the party can shake off its losses and renew itself, this could change only as long as it focuses on remaining alive and relevant.