Why AAP is the future of Indian politics

A few months ago, a friend and I were discussing the funding of Indian urban infrastructure. For a country aspiring to be a global power, our infrastructure is a crying shame.

The schizophrenic Rao Tula Ram flyover, which everybody must use if they are flying into Delhi and have to enter the city, is a giant [insert appropriate cussword here] to the world, leaving investors and potential partners stranded in traffic.

In a country whose civilisation is based on monsoon patterns, every year the rains come as a nasty surprise to our cities, leaving us flooded and miserable.

My friend suggested that if only the mayors and the elected officials had the funds, they could look after the city better. She suggested that if Indian cities could raise funds through municipal bonds, as many American cities do, they could fund the development that was needed, and would have the independence to invest in the infrastructure that was needed.

And yet, is money really the problem?

India is not really a poor country. If we can afford non-performing assets (read as: Very Big Loans to the Very Rich and Connected) who have decided to pocket the money kindly handed over to them by our public sector banks of 6 lakh crore (given that 4-5 lakh crores is from nationalised banks, this equals about 3,000 rupees from the pocket of every Indian), we can surely spare some small change for the betterment of our cities?

And it is not as we do not have ideas. Robust organisations such as Janaagraha and Praja have done some excellent work looking at the performance of cities, what is needed, and how to go about it. And still our cities remain a mess.

A simpler explanation is that mayors and other decision makers in India’s urban areas are not the true decision makers. The party that controls Maharashtra is the party that decides what Bombay gets or doesn’t. The party that rules Karnataka is the one that makes decisions about Bangalore, not the mayor.

This pattern repeats itself. The chief minister of a state, largely beholden to rural votes, rules the major cities. They have limited interested in making the city better, because the majority of their votes do not come from urban areas. They have no compelling incentive.

They do have an incentive to make the city worse, though. The main source of funds for Indian political parties is the real estate sector. An interesting paper by Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav looked at how closely the spending on real estate matched that of elections in India.

So here is the problem: If a huge amount of black money is being spent by real estate developers to fund elections, what favours do you think are being extracted in return? Kapur and Vaishnav, as well as a number of others, point to how politicians change the rules to favour their backers.

In other words, the black money from real estate developers to politicians, allows them to circumvent the laws and rules that are meant to make a city a better place to live.

The urban infrastructure we get is created for the benefit of running political parties with black money. It is not created in the interests of the citizens that inhabit the cities.

While this problem has been known for a while, few solutions have come up. While the BJP talked a lot about the corruption of the Congress, it also blocked any RTI queries into the funding of political parties once it came to power. There is no hope there.

If hope exists of change, it resides in the Aam Aadmi Party, and this is for two reasons: the first because it is an urban party, and, in effect, Arvind Kejriwal is the glorified mayor.

The difference is that he is not politically dependent on any party apparatus that would milk the infrastructure of the city to buy votes.

The second, more important aspect, is that Kejriwal has declared where the funding of his party is coming from. He is under no pressure to change, or circumvent, laws for black money funders.

How does this play out in real life? The best example of this is the chikungunya crisis that hit the city.

Initially AAP and Kejriwal tried to play down the problem, and received an earful of abuse from both opponents and supporters. Given that AAP had no backers outside, and its survival is critically dependent on how it performs in the city, it quickly pivoted, and started doing campaigns to raise awareness and help deal with the problem.

The key difference this AAP turnabout showed from the actions of other parties is in its responsiveness. Since it has no hidden paymasters to placate, its key incentive is to respond to its base – exactly what democracy is supposed to be about.

Compare this with the waffling of the Congress over the Commonwealth Games, and the urban disaster that Bombay has become between the NCP, Congress, BJP and Shiv Sena governing at all levels. The only responsiveness that the government there has shown is to act as a broker for extortion on behalf of the MNS.

India is urbanising at an increasingly rapid pace. About a third of our population, 377 million, is currently urban, but by 2031 that number is projected to go up to 600 million. This means that the urban segment of the voting population will soon start to matter as much as the rural one. The question is whether we will be content with the rotten infrastructure that we have, and the corrupt politics behind it?

Going out on a limb, I would suggest that Indians would like to live in cities that cater to their needs, where the government is responsive to their needs. The only political party that fulfils these criteria right now is AAP. For all of its problems – and to elucidate them all would require another essay – AAP is the future of Indian politics.

Whether AAP will be able to live up to this promise, though, remains to be seen. Currently the party is seen as a one-man show, and while that may work for Delhi for the short-term (and, frankly, most of the major parties cannot claim to be anything other than one-man and one-woman shows), it will not work if AAP is to expand.

Every city has its own defining characteristics, and the very independence that Kejriwal enjoys are the ones that a one-man show restricts. The type of new political leader that India will now see emerging will be an urban leader, and if India’s efforts to become a leader in manufacturing bear fruit, those leaders, to have a mass base, will be labour leaders.

So far, in the interest of keeping a broad base, AAP has eschewed a political direction, merely being a party of anti-corruption. While this is a much-needed corrective to the builder-politician nexus, the people who pay the full cost of the problems of the city are the poor labourers – it is largely they who suffer the price for polluted water, air, and the life of slums.

If this class – approximately 17 per cent of India’s urban population lives in slums – becomes a large feature of the AAP vote, then social justice – an issue long neglected – will once again find itself on the Indian political agenda.

Also read: AAP has gone to school, teaching Delhi an important lesson

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