The Candidate: Attention seeking party

The Aam Aadmi Party, saviours of India’s politics, are laying siege to Gujarat, fortress of our other saviour. The fortress isn’t defended — its master is elsewhere slaying bigger dragons. That Narendra Modi isn’t worried by the AAP is shown by his lack of reference to them. His attack is reserved for the Congress and those parties that the Bharatiya Janata Party sees as its enemies. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal, which betrayed the BJP’s trust and severed a successful alliance is one. Mulayam Singh, arch enemy of Mr Modi since the Somnath-Ayodhya Rath Yatra, is another.

The AAP in contrast gets no mention, and perhaps this is because Mr Modi sees it as nationally irrelevant. What about Gujarat? The AAP’s leader, Arvind Kejriwal has been cleverly nicknamed AK-49, advertising both his destructive talents and the number of days his government lasted before gutting itself.

He has brought his barricade-storming tactics to Gujarat, getting into trouble immediately with the Election Commission. Part of this is deliberate — the AAP knows that it gets media coverage by making a nuisance of itself. It learnt this lesson from the Congress and all the other parties which use disruption of process, including in Parliament, because it doesn’t offend the voter.

But will the AAP make an impression? I do not think it will. Gujarat has been a two-party state for a very long time. The Congress has deep roots in the state of Mahatma Gandhi. Even at the receiving end of over two decades of defeat (it last won an election there in 1985) it consistently retains more than a third of the vote.

On the other side, it is difficult to name another state where the BJP or, for that matter, any other party is so popular with the citizens. The Babri Masjid movement, beloved of Gujaratis, sealed the bond between its dominant peasantry, the Patels, and the BJP. Gujarat was a three-party state, with the Janata Party/Janata Dal always present in some or other form, till the emergence of the BJP. Once the Babri Masjid issue picked up, the BJP took all the non-Congress vote and it has kept it. The party now gets about 50 per cent of the vote in Gujarat, which is a superb achievement, un-matched by the BJP anywhere else. This includes the other large two-party states, like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, in which it grapples with the Congress.

Such high satisfaction levels, both with the party in power and the Opposition, mean that the job of the AAP will be difficult in Gujarat. Its primary issue in Delhi, that of massive corruption like the telecom scandal and the loot in executing the Commonwealth Games, are Centre and Congress-focussed. The BJP has not been complicit in these things, and this is why, till the Delhi elections ended, Mr Kejriwal and company picked on the Congress. It is only after that, and with the opinion polls showing a BJP win, that the attention has shifted.
But that level of scandal is not to be found in Gujarat. Even if there has been some favouritism to industrialists, it has not been shown to be transactional in nature, as was clear in the Delhi scams.

This is why the attack on Mr Modi as being as corrupt as the Congress will wither. Perhaps the AAP leadership already knows this and has mounted its gambit in Gujarat for other reasons. One explanation for attacking Mr Modi on his home ground is that the AAP benefits elsewhere from the resulting focus. If there is one thing the party is excellent at doing, it is drawing attention to itself.