Chandrahas Choudhury
By Chandrahas Choudhury
After listing in the opposite direction, Indian democracy has just got more diverse.
A year of extraordinary churning reached its grand finale on Tuesday when the young Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party) won by a landslide in New Delhi’s Legislative Assembly elections. What was most astonishing about AAP’s performance was that it routed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the country’s ruling party, winning 67 out of 70 seats.
The defeat was a personal setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who in last May’s national elections seized power with a similarly electrifying campaign and decisive victory. Modi and BJP high command had poured considerable amounts of time and money into the Delhi elections. Modi campaigned extensively — only last week, he addressed four public rallies — asking voters to usher in a local government that would work closely with his own.
It was the first reverse suffered by Modi in a political career spanning 13 years — an astonishing record. This suggests not so much that ‘the Modi effect’, which delivered several states to BJP last year, is waning, but that he is not invincible and, if anything, he has been in power long enough for his political emphases (and evasions) to work against him.
By so comprehensively routing the party in power at the centre, AAP has opened up political possibilities and set electoral records. It was, for instance, one of a handful of occasions in independent India’s 63-year-old history of elections when one party took more than 50 percent of the vote.
Most important, AAP’s victory fills the vacuum left in New Delhi city-state by the rapid decline of the Congress Party which, having given up power at the centre last May, seems too self-absorbed and supine to play the role of a responsible opposition in parliament. (Predictably, Congress fared worse than BJP in the elections — winning no seats.)
Modi knows that all the way to the end of his term in 2019, he will have an adversary in the capital in the form of Arvind Kejriwal, head of AAP, who astutely positioned himself as a kind of David to Modi’s Goliath. When outrageous provocations to delicate religious equilibrium from the Hindu right — such as “ghar wapsi” (religious homecoming) and “honour Godse” campaigns of recent months — next erupt, there will be a powerful new voice in the capital all too eager to attack them, as Modi had not.
Last but not least, BJP will now be forced, perhaps as early as the budget session in parliament later this month, to clarify its much-vaunted “development model.”
This is being criticised by some on the right as favouring piecemeal advances instead of coherent economic reforms, by others on the left as being too friendly to big corporations and too slapdash about environmental concerns.
That’s not to say that AAP’s view of economic policy is sound either. Just as Modi’s election promise to bring back black money stashed in Swiss banks to India proved chimerical, Kejriwal’s similar promise to end Delhi’s pervasive “rishwatkhori” — the culture of petty bribery and corruption — will also test him severely.
As Bloomberg View’s Dhiraj Nayyar points out, the setback to Modi will be an example to Kejriwal, too, of how swiftly things can go wrong.
Whatever the impact of AAP’s victory on the economic policies of the state and the country, there is some reason to be optimistic that it will in the long run have a cleansing effect on the economies of political parties.
Part of AAP’s appeal to poor and middle-class voters was that its campaign was financed by small and large donors whose contributions were listed on its website. Having won a major electoral prize with this approach, it can draw attention to the murky funding system produced by election-finance laws which allow (as detailed in separate papers by E Sridharan and Rajeev Gowda and political scientist Milan Vaishnav) for a lack of transparency in political finance and create “a market for criminality” in politics.
The setback in Delhi may prove, in the long run, to be good for Modi and his party. Since last May, BJP has been unable to resist the temptation to deploy him extensively in state elections.
And perhaps Modi, who loves the thrill of rousing a crowd, had been unable to resist rhetorical arts and had rationalised this tendency — and the enormous investment of time that campaigning requires — to himself as a way of spreading his gospel of “development” among his far-flung citizenry.
One might say that nine months into his term, Modi was yet to exit campaign mode. Every new victory he delivered for his party confirmed and extended the Modi effect. A party with a huge cadre and a wide base of capable politicians was becoming more reliant on the figure of a “great leader” to come from the capital to help win the state. Whether this was good for democracy, it was not good for democracy within BJP.
The office of the prime minister is a full-time job — more than full time. Perhaps, after the reverse in Delhi and the realisation that defeats in state elections are more embarrassing than victories are pleasurable, Modi will focus on his primary task and leave the state units of the party and their leaders to find their language and strategies.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Chandrahas Choudhury
After listing in the opposite direction, Indian democracy has just got more diverse.
A year of extraordinary churning reached its grand finale on Tuesday when the young Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party) won by a landslide in New Delhi’s Legislative Assembly elections. What was most astonishing about AAP’s performance was that it routed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the country’s ruling party, winning 67 out of 70 seats.
The defeat was a personal setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who in last May’s national elections seized power with a similarly electrifying campaign and decisive victory. Modi and BJP high command had poured considerable amounts of time and money into the Delhi elections. Modi campaigned extensively — only last week, he addressed four public rallies — asking voters to usher in a local government that would work closely with his own.
It was the first reverse suffered by Modi in a political career spanning 13 years — an astonishing record. This suggests not so much that ‘the Modi effect’, which delivered several states to BJP last year, is waning, but that he is not invincible and, if anything, he has been in power long enough for his political emphases (and evasions) to work against him.
By so comprehensively routing the party in power at the centre, AAP has opened up political possibilities and set electoral records. It was, for instance, one of a handful of occasions in independent India’s 63-year-old history of elections when one party took more than 50 percent of the vote.
Most important, AAP’s victory fills the vacuum left in New Delhi city-state by the rapid decline of the Congress Party which, having given up power at the centre last May, seems too self-absorbed and supine to play the role of a responsible opposition in parliament. (Predictably, Congress fared worse than BJP in the elections — winning no seats.)
Modi knows that all the way to the end of his term in 2019, he will have an adversary in the capital in the form of Arvind Kejriwal, head of AAP, who astutely positioned himself as a kind of David to Modi’s Goliath. When outrageous provocations to delicate religious equilibrium from the Hindu right — such as “ghar wapsi” (religious homecoming) and “honour Godse” campaigns of recent months — next erupt, there will be a powerful new voice in the capital all too eager to attack them, as Modi had not.
Last but not least, BJP will now be forced, perhaps as early as the budget session in parliament later this month, to clarify its much-vaunted “development model.”
This is being criticised by some on the right as favouring piecemeal advances instead of coherent economic reforms, by others on the left as being too friendly to big corporations and too slapdash about environmental concerns.
That’s not to say that AAP’s view of economic policy is sound either. Just as Modi’s election promise to bring back black money stashed in Swiss banks to India proved chimerical, Kejriwal’s similar promise to end Delhi’s pervasive “rishwatkhori” — the culture of petty bribery and corruption — will also test him severely.
As Bloomberg View’s Dhiraj Nayyar points out, the setback to Modi will be an example to Kejriwal, too, of how swiftly things can go wrong.
Whatever the impact of AAP’s victory on the economic policies of the state and the country, there is some reason to be optimistic that it will in the long run have a cleansing effect on the economies of political parties.
Part of AAP’s appeal to poor and middle-class voters was that its campaign was financed by small and large donors whose contributions were listed on its website. Having won a major electoral prize with this approach, it can draw attention to the murky funding system produced by election-finance laws which allow (as detailed in separate papers by E Sridharan and Rajeev Gowda and political scientist Milan Vaishnav) for a lack of transparency in political finance and create “a market for criminality” in politics.
The setback in Delhi may prove, in the long run, to be good for Modi and his party. Since last May, BJP has been unable to resist the temptation to deploy him extensively in state elections.
And perhaps Modi, who loves the thrill of rousing a crowd, had been unable to resist rhetorical arts and had rationalised this tendency — and the enormous investment of time that campaigning requires — to himself as a way of spreading his gospel of “development” among his far-flung citizenry.
One might say that nine months into his term, Modi was yet to exit campaign mode. Every new victory he delivered for his party confirmed and extended the Modi effect. A party with a huge cadre and a wide base of capable politicians was becoming more reliant on the figure of a “great leader” to come from the capital to help win the state. Whether this was good for democracy, it was not good for democracy within BJP.
The office of the prime minister is a full-time job — more than full time. Perhaps, after the reverse in Delhi and the realisation that defeats in state elections are more embarrassing than victories are pleasurable, Modi will focus on his primary task and leave the state units of the party and their leaders to find their language and strategies.
WP-BLOOMBERG
