It was exactly at this time last year (July-August), that Goans travelling anywhere on the Panjim-Margao highway were greeted with massive hoardings, and if they missed these, then they saw banners in their bylanes and villages of a survey conducted by someone called “Kautilya” which concluded that the fledgling Aam Admi Party would make audacious electoral inroads and get 14 seats with a 35% vote share in the Assembly elections. While AAP, quite obviously fed off this the buzz in Goa, Goans wondered who exactly was “Kautilya”.
Those with a knowledge of ancient history and mythology, are aware that Kautilya was another name for Chanakya, the author of the greatest treatise on politics ‘Arthashashtra’.
In Goa, the ‘Kautilya’ was Kautilya-Teertha, an agency that conducts political surveys after testing the political waters, whose findings soared the political climate, leading to several Goans putting on the cap and marching for a sweeping change. Goa went through a positive “broom” time while AAP did all it could to project the survey findings as a pre-announcement of the poll results.
Those who conducted the survey during a span of 120 days, from April to July claimed to have mapped all the 40 seats and covered around 2000 voters in each constituency. This was a sample size of almost 10%, which is indeed sizeable.
AAP’s final tally of no seats to less than 7% (6.3%) of the votes, after fighting the most visible and non conventional campaign, was an embarrassment not just to the science of poll assessment but to the great Kautilya himself, who was presumably the inspiration for the founders of Kautilya-Teertha. But, as Herald argued, after the results, the decimation of AAP has as much to do with how much they got the people dynamics of Goa wrong, as the reiteration of how Goans were not ready for a total change of syllabus of the voter-political party dynamics.
This can be gauged from the fact that the Kautilya survey did get the BJP tally almost right. It predicted 11 while the BJP got 13. It gave AAP 14 seats and the Congress 7. With the Congress getting 17 seats, it is very likely that the expected AAP voters withdrew and went to the Congress.
AAP learnt it the hard way and they learnt it hard, so hard that its leadership decided to exit Goa, leaving the state unit to keep its presence going and little else. We have it on good authority that some of its local leaders, including the defeated AAP candidate from Panjim Valmiki Naik, did want to contest. It ultimately pulled out from both seats, in the by-elections even though in Panjim, the AAP did dent both the Congress and the BJP by drawing some of their votes.
The decision confirms a few ground truths. 1) The AAP has unequivocally decided to take a lot of time to decide and get back into the Goan electoral space (as different from the Goan political space). 2) After being vociferous against both the Congress and the BJP calling them two ends of the same coin and that AAP was the only alternative, it now says that its presence would confuse the electorate. Instead it should have plainly said that the people of Goa, in spite of a lot of hope had rejected them soundly and therefore it finds no reason to go back to the people within five months, though the party was working to get their confidence. In a statement, the party said, “it would be politically prudent for us to refrain from contesting the by-elections, rather than further confusing the electorate.”
It should simply accept that it is not in a position to invest time, manpower and resources in getting into a battle which they will not even impact, forget win. It is also not in a position to take the grand stand of splendid isolation from the morass of other political parties and emerge as a white knight. It has simply retreated and for now it can satisfy itself by calling it a tactical or prudent retreat.
