Delhi polls: AAP victory opens Pandora's box of possibilities

Victories sometime create greater problems of vulnerability than defeat. Victory adds a touch of piety, hysteria, which one often sees missing in moments of struggle. The AAP return to Delhi will be one of the greatest comebacks in politics. Such a result opens up a Pandora's box of possibilities.

One can think of a series of scenarios. Firstly, the AAP can immediately become a quarrelsome family creating a few public scenes. Since many of the more stubborn characters in the AAP have disappeared, this does not feel like an impending threat. The Ilmis and their ilk have left for other watering grounds and the AAP sounds better knit and less likely to damage itself.

The second threat to the AAP came from its split-level style, combining protest and governance. The AAP is much clearer that politics and policy can be sequential events and the possibility of the AAP leading dharnas against the federal government seems slim. Both the BJP and the AAP have promised to work together. In fact the possibilities of a new dialogue on federalism is what the two should ideally work for.

The third danger, something one witnessed in the unpleasant protests of the BJP cadres, is a more immediate possibility. The BJP cadres feel cheated out of Delhi. Many would argue that a leader like Harsh Vardhan rather than a lemon like Kiran Bedi would have seen them happily home. Watching them protest one felt there were primordial differences between the cadres and the groundswell called the AAP. One could witness constituency level struggles in the months to come.

However the biggest threat to the AAP comes from the web of expectations, the net of new perceptions about politics and problem solving it has created around itself. The AAP is offering a new politics of empowerment and has created an urgency, an immediacy around this. Time, speed can be disturbing factor but if Kejriwal and his team were to show some sense of maturity, of what the French philosopher Bergson, called duree. The AAP has to create a sense of lived time, the ritual time of expectations around itself. It can no longer be the 49-day wonder it once claimed to be.

The AAP needs to announce an immediate time table of policy spelling out what can be cured immediately and what needs a gradualist turn of politics. Some changes in electricity rates or more urgently access to schools need to be worked out quickly, while the demand for statehood for Delhi can be addressed like the Penelope’s cloak it is.

The AAP has to create a new style of problem solving. As I see, it is a four-layered party. There are the originals like Sisodia, Yadav and Kejriwal. There is a younger group that has earned its epaulettes quickly. One thinks of Atishi Marlena or Raghav Chaddha. They displayed a maturity that was impressive. They are the older sages like the Ramdas’ or Kamal Chenoy, who have deep sense of political and the memory of the older battles deep in them. Then there are the constituency level followers. While the AAP’s politics has to be transparent, a bit of sedateness would not hurt.

If it is planning to upscale itself from a Delhi story to an all-India alternative, it must create communities of goodwill roping in academics, well-wishers into problem solving communities.

Eventually, this will be a challenge of leadership. Kejriwal has to show that he is less authoritarian but more effective than a Hazare or a Bedi. His leadership needs humour and grace.

In a deep and fundamental way, this is going to be great learning experiment in politics. If the AAP pulls it off, the era of empowerment, of a citizenship approach to problem solving will have begun.