AAP's recent victory in Punjab and its strong performance in Delhi over three assembly elections show it's ready to fill in as a serious national-level challenger to BJP.
Himanshu Pandit was 19 years old when he was lathicharged for protesting outside Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s house, and later detained by cops. It was August 2012 and his Class XII pre-boards were due soon. But something came up that changed his plans forever. A nondescript man without any political clout had given a call for a new, corruption-free India. “Needless to say, like thousands of other students and aspirational youths of the time, I got inspired,” Pandit says.
Soon, Arvind Kejriwal arrived in Bhopal to sit on a hunger strike and court arrest. “His personality and dedication struck a chord. Here was a leader who was not afraid to get arrested or lathicharged like us,” Pandit adds. Now 29, he has been working with Kejriwal ever since, first as part of the India Against Corruption (IAC) team, then as a cadre of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
Pandit works with the data team and social media cell of AAP, which was launched in November 2012, following an alleged fallout between Kejriwal and social activist Anna Hazare, who had been the two main faces of the 2011 IAC movement, which had been formed earlier that year to demand the passage of a Jan Lokpal Bill. Today, AAP is the incumbent party in Delhi and basking in the glory of its recent poll sweep in Punjab. It is also entering Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, which are soon to go to the polls.
In Delhi, AAP has over 13,000 booths manned by 10,000 men, Pandit says. Another 8,000 people work at the mandal and ward levels. Earlier in April, the party claimed to have inducted three lakh members within 20 days in Himachal.
AAP’s cadres are distinct from its rivals. While the BJP cadres have roots in the RSS, the Congress is powered by high-profile political lineages and a traditional worker-base that can be traced back to the Independence movement. But Kejriwal’s party relies on a different and seemingly more formidable force of ‘aam aadmi’.
Building a cadre base takes decades. The AAP is based on a voluntary cadre system wherein most members work part-time. A majority of the workers have day jobs and come from various backgrounds—academe, law, tech, IT, business, social sector. The glue that binds these disparate people is the vision of anti-corruption and populism.
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Preeti Mehra, a high court lawyer, has been working with AAP since 2013, because she wanted change. Mehra said that in Delhi, the party put a lot of effort in going to each and every neighbourhood and connecting with residents not only for votes but also to understand their problems and seek local volunteers to work with them.
Mehra says unlike in other parties, where political clout, dynasty and money play a huge role in swaying ordinary workers, a local-level community leader had the chance to reach the top easily by just doing hard work. She adds that apart from the desire to improve the lives of fellow citizens, she works for AAP because it gives her “respect”.
By recruiting ordinary people into the party fold and allowing them space to share their ideas on governance and strategies to work for hyper-local improvement, AAP has also created a reserve of political leaders among its ranks that may not look like the stereotypical crony neta but perform consistently in their own constituencies.
Shalimar Bagh MLA Bandana Kumari is an example. A former LIC agent, Kumari has grown up in the area she now governs and lives with no airs or additional security, despite being elected as MLA thrice. In 2011, when she was working as an activist for children’s education, she had met the then education minister to request him to secure accommodation and education for an underprivileged child. “He told me ‘If every child becomes literate, what will we ministers do?’ That incident left an impact on me,” Kumari recalls.
“The new party did not just promise freedom from corruption that was choking us at all levels, but also promised public welfare and social responsibility of leaders to ensure the same. That was the real draw for many of us who may not have initially cared about politics but wanted to work for the nation,” she tells Outlook.
Despite becoming an MLA, Kumari says she remains accessible to her neighbours and subjects. “My doors are always open. For a political leader to be like this in India is a fresh change, and people like me better for it,” says Kumari.
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This, says AAP’s Delhi convenor and state Cabinet minister Gopal Rai, is what sets AAP’s cadres apart. “Most of our volunteers have their own lives and are do-gooders in their own community, but are willing to spend ‘quality time’ working for the party and the country,” Rai tells Outlook.
He stresses that while most of AAP’s cadres are voluntary, the work they did was key to winning elections in new states. “In Punjab, we worked on building our cadres ground up because we needed to ensure that news of the good work we had done in Delhi reaches the voters there. We even have cadres at the booth and council levels,” he says.
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Visibility, as Himanshu Pandit put it earlier, is key to grabbing voter’s attention, and a face at every booth during elections ensures that. But apart from visibility and promoting the party manifesto or achievements, the cadre’s role is also to fight fires. “When other parties in Punjab tried to launch a campaign maligning Kejriwal as a ‘terrorist’, we could sustain our campaign because the cadre system we had built ground-up ensured everyone knew what the facts were. Having people on the ground is crucial to winning polls,” Rai says.
Deepak Kumar, who has worked with AAP in Punjab since its early days, however, is upset with the recent expansion of AAP’s cadres. “Many like me have been working in AAP for the past decade. We have helped form the foundation of the party in the state. However, new cadres who are joining from other parties are bringing in their own ethos, which is distinct from AAP’s,” Kumar tells Outlook. “The grievance is that the party seems to be favouring them for electoral benefit,” Kumar says.
Delhi Jal Board vice-chairman and Greater Kailash MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj disagrees. “Bringing in new people from different walks of life including different parties adds to the heterogeneous fabric of the party and brings us new ideas and perspectives,” he tells Outlook.
While trying to expand its footprint, the party now faces a new challenge. With aggressive recruitment strategies and a bid to become the national alternative to the BJP and Congress, AAP has to resolve how to induct more cadres without surrendering its core values. While in Punjab, the party found favour with voters’ anti-incumbency mood, making forays into states like Gujarat and Himachal will require organisation, manpower and support at a gargantuan scale. Reports of AAP workers joining BJP en masse have already started circling. Will Kejriwal’s aam aadmi withstand the poll heat?
(This appeared in the print edition as "Season for Mangoes")
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