Does AAP have a 'moat'?
Plus, is one '0' different from another '0'?
Jotting down:
Picking up from last week’s edition about the Budget, the RBI did indeed lower interest rates for the first time in five years and announced further efforts to infuse liquidity into the system, although some of the latter was in response to its own efforts to protect the rupee and the fear that those actions would impede bank efforts to transmit the rate cuts.
Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh has finally stepped down. What will that mean for the civil war-like conflict he presided over?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visited France as co-chair of the AI Summit with President Emmanuel Macron, with India set to host the next edition later this year, even as a complex question has been pinging around the domestic tech space: Why didn’t DeepSeek come from India? (For those who speak Hindi, this episode of Puliyabaazi, on the state of deep technology in India, covers the ground well). Meanwhile, Modi and Macron agreed to co-develop small and advanced nuclear reactors.
Modi then went to the US, where he offered a number of things to Trump, renamed a few joint programmes, was described as having ‘pulled off magic’, and didn’t manage to convince the American president not to apply reciprocal tarrifs. I’ll have links and more on Modi-Trump in our next edition.
Plug
On the Political Cycle, we spoke to Dhrubo Jyoti (whose quintet of pieces on the Delhi elections – class, welfare, civic issues, ideology, corruption – is full of insights) about the Aam Aadmi Party’s loss and what it tell us about being an Opposition up against a hegemonic movement.
Killer AAP
Faced with the sudden rise of Snapchat use among younger Americans, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom ended up making a pivotal decision in 2016: His app would just copy the best feature of the upstart. Instagram soon rolled out ‘Stories’, a more ephemeral form of photo sharing, using the same name as Snapchat and even formally crediting its rival, while nevertheless ripping it off and succeeding massively in preventing the smaller app’s growth – a strategy that analyst Ben Thompson described as ‘the audacity of copying well.’
It might be something of a stretched analogy, but tech world tactics, including the abuse of power by large players, were what came to my mind when reading some of the analysis about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s landslide victory in Delhi elections last week, its first victory in the city-state in 27 years, having won 48 out of 70 seats – a 2/3rds majority – where it also got to dethrone the Aam Aadmi Party after a decade in power.
One (persuasive) critique of the Aam Aadmi Party has been that, in seeking to build out a ‘governance platform’ that doesn’t challenge the BJP on ideology, it has ended up looking more and more like Modi’s party over the years. As Aakash Joshi writes,
“Kejriwal’s refusal to visit riot-affected North-East Delhi in 2020, the demonising of Rohingya refugees, being largely silent about “bulldozer raj”, sending pilgrims to Ayodhya to coincide with the anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition anniversary, and even Chief Minister Atishi playing Bharat by keeping the CM’s chair vacant for “Ram” Kejriwal — the list of the AAP’s attempts to be “BJP lite” are numerous. In this, the party has learnt no lessons from the Congress’s intermittent — and almost always failed — attempts at “soft Hindutva”.
AAP has gone further than most down this route. The decision by the government to search for “Bangladeshi migrants” in Delhi government schools was arguably its moral nadir, showing that the well-being of the very children and families it served through its reform of schools can be sacrificed for an election.”
But the interesting thing about this evolution is that the moves haven’t only gone in one direction. The BJP too, today, looks more like AAP than it did a few years ago. If Kerjiwal’s party was promising Rs 2,100 per woman head of household, the BJP would offer Rs 2,500. For a leader who came to power promising ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ and just a few years ago decrying ‘revdi (handout) politics’, Modi’s party is now resolutely welfarist and, over the course of the campaign, was quite deliberate about not threatening to do anything different from Kejriwal’s government.
Here was Amit Shah in the run-up to the polls:
“A serious lie is being spread in Delhi to influence the elections. A staff in my bungalow said that they are getting repeated phone calls saying that when BJP comes to power the free schemes will be stopped....I have never seen such low level electioneering in my public life. I want to make it clear that when the BJP comes to power, all welfare schemes will continue.”
In almost a mirror image of Kejriwal’s attempt to build a brand on ‘governance’ and ‘delivery’ rather than taking on the trickier questions underlying Indian political economy – what Asim Ali described as ‘post-cleavage politics’ – the BJP decided to downplay (though not disown) its own usual anti-Muslim playbook and even its plans to go hammer and tongs on corruption, and instead just promised to do a good job:
“The AAP’s handsome victory in the municipal corporation elections two years ago became a curse in disguise as citizens asked why a party that prided itself on delivery and being present on the ground was no longer focused on either…
Two weeks into its campaign, the BJP suddenly realised this. It quickly dialled down the rhetoric on corruption and amped up its outreach to convert the simmering anger into votes. It stayed away from incendiary rhetoric and focussed on a campaign that turned the elections into a referendum on the AAP and Arvind Kejriwal. The irritation over Delhi’s civic decay decisively turned the tide against the party whose USP was being rooted, delivery-oriented and transparent. The middle-class found no reason to continue backing a party whose governance model had been effectively thwarted.”
Delhi’s unusual governance structure, where the Union Government-appointed Lt. Governor has much more power over policy than elsewhere, permitted the BJP to also spend the last five years putting obstacle after obstacle in front of AAP, and eventually wear down the voters – some of whom also began to see these claims as an excuse. This tilting of the playing field simply cannot be ignored, even if it doesn’t entirely explain AAP’s loss. (Read Yogendra Yadav – who was purged from the party early on – on this issue).
The two big questions that emerge from the result then are as follows: What is the BJP’s vision for Delhi, a city that ought in many ways to be high-functioning given its wealth and concentration of power? And what does AAP’s loss mean for Opposition politics in India? To stretch the tech analogy even further, Kejriwal’s party in Delhi appears to have no moat – what convinces voters, and, maybe more importantly in the Indian context, leaders, to stick with a ‘good governance’ party when it has nothing to govern?
Read also:
Akshay Marathe: “A gun was held to the heads of Delhi’s people: if you do not vote for the BJP, your city government will remain dysfunctional, and your beloved city will decline.”
“By post-cleavage politics, we mean a party which takes no clear stands on distributive conflicts among different classes, communities and interests, but speaks of a ‘universalistic’ and ‘pragmatic’ politics. Much like BJD, AAP engineered a politics of ‘triangulation’, pitching its electoral tent at an equidistance from Congress and BJP. In the BJP-dominant phase since 2014, the survival of both AAP and BJD depended on wooing back a floating bloc of voters, who switched back to them in state elections after voting for BJP in the national elections. That balancing act required a distinctive state model built on the free provision of public goods and services, and a charismatic face at the state level (Naveen Patnaik, Arvind Kejriwal, and YS Jagan Reddy). The post-cleavage model of politics has now reached a point of exhaustion, with BJD and YSRCP losing office last year and AAP in this election.”
“A common thread between the BJP’s surprising victories in Haryana, Maharashtra, and now Delhi, is that a chief minister candidate was either not named or the issue was deemed irrelevant to the party’s political appeal. These elections have been won on sheer organisational capacity and efficiency — the fact that the party makes fewer mistakes while picking candidates, in mobilising voters, and in preventing the fracturing of its core vote. But this is also a very different kind of politics for the BJP. Paradoxically, winning states in this manner does not dramatically increase the political appeal of PM Modi. A party that was so long run on Brand Modi is gradually developing a new identity (although we do not yet know what it will be).”
“To be sure, one should be careful in writing obituaries for the AAP today. It still has a 40% plus vote share. But one also needs to ask a question at the same time. If the BJP really goes on to fulfill its promise of matching all of AAP’s existing and promised welfare programmes in Delhi, are people, including those who have voted for the AAP, really going to miss it? Would things have been different had the AAP tried to build an ideological challenge against the BJP rather than putting all its eggs in the welfare basket?”
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, on the contradictions of Delhi that the BJP will have to manage.
“The Delhi outcome is bad news for the entire Opposition, for it gives new heart and new impetus to the BJP. It has shown up the fault lines in the INDIA bloc, of which the AAP and the Congress are a part. “Aur lado”, J&K CM Omar Abdullah taunted both the parties.
Most regional parties in INDIA chose to support Kejriwal — and not the Congress — in Delhi, as the two parties fought separately. It is possible that both the AAP and the Congress, which has not moved beyond the princely figure of “0” seats it had notched up in the last two elections, might have fared better had they fought together. Clearly, Opposition parties have to refashion the INDIA alliance if they want to remain relevant. The Congress, whose vote share rose about 2 percentage points to 6.34%, lost deposits in at least 60 seats but polled more votes than the AAP’s margin of defeat in 13 constituencies.”Listen: G Sampath speaks to K Kailash on the ‘end of alternative politics’ in India.
Miscellany
Can’t Make This Up
