Bharat Bhushan - AAP: Modi’s nightmare
AAP: Modi’s nightmare
The single moment that lifted Prime Minister Manmohan’s Singh’s press conference out of the ordinary was his declaration that Narendra Modi would be a disastrous Prime Minister for India. The question is who is going to stop him? The only political entity on the horizon which can take Mr Modi head on is the Aam Aadmi Party. Unlike the Congress, AAP is not in defensive mode. It has the raw courage of a new contender and a pro-people image to counter Mr Modi and the BJP. Indeed, if Mr Modi is not already worried about AAP, he should be for several reasons.
The AAP has already broken the momentum of the Modi campaign. A few months ago, every small utterance by Mr Modi was reported by the media. His bravado was taken as proof of leadership. He seems to have been replaced in public mind-space by Arvind Kejriwal and AAP. Mr Modi is now invariably relegated to the inside pages while every initiative of AAP dominates the front page of national newspapers. Mr Modi’s pronouncements also seem to hold less interest for TV audiences than Mr Kejriwal’s, who is undoubtedly the flavour of the season and crucial to the ratings of television channels.
While Mr Modi’s focus is on election rallies, AAP and Mr Kejriwal, as the head of a new government, are seen to be focused on people-oriented activities — making water supply free, halving electricity rates, setting up night-shelters and, very importantly, shunning VIP-culture in their personal lives. If Mr Modi is indeed taking radical administrative decisions in Gujarat amidst his ambitious election campaign, it is not apparent to people in other parts of the country. Reports coming out of the state suggest that the chief minister has little time to focus on administration given his busy tour schedule.
What must be especially galling to Mr Modi is the loss of support from the youth of the country and the aspirational middle classes who were said to be united behind him till now. The AAP appears to be making deep inroads into this constituency. According to newspaper reports, an analysis of Twitter, blogs, discussion forums and Facebook shows that after the AAP victory in the Delhi state elections, Mr Modi’s social media mentions declined by 23 per cent while that of Mr Kejriwal’s rose by a staggering 120 per cent.
Mr Modi’s cyber warriors — some allegedly paid — were used to malign secular public intellectuals, media commentators and even Mr Modi’s critics within the Bharatiya Janata Party. These tactics are difficult to use against AAP as it has a larger and, most importantly, an unpaid and voluntary corps of cyber supporters. Provoking them may prove to be costly for Mr Modi. The net result of this is that Mr Modi and the BJP appear to be losing the battle of perceptions, despite laying claims to Sardar Patel’s legacy, invoking Bihari pride with inaccurate references to “historical victories” against the armies of Alexander, projecting Shivaji as a Hindutva ideologue and Mr Modi’s public embrace of a certain hirsute yoga guru.
The BJP’s talk of clean and accountable governance takes a further knock when B.S. Yeddyurappa, neck-deep in corruption, is invited back into its fold. The tainted politician, once an Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh swayamsevak (volunteer), probably expects to be charge-sheeted in corruption cases. It explains why he has declared that neither he nor his son would contest the coming election. In Himachal Pradesh, too, Prem Kumar Dhumal, the defeated BJP chief minister and his son, Anurag Thakur, fear being charged in corruption cases. Perhaps this is why the party has launched a pre-emptive campaign charging the sitting Congress chief minister with corruption. The BJP will find it difficult to project itself as a crusader for clean public life.
However, it is not only in the battle of perceptions that the BJP has been put on the back foot. Its electoral calculations in several constituencies are likely to go awry as AAP threatens constituencies which the BJP was confident of winning. The seven Lok Sabha constituencies of Delhi and the four surrounding Delhi — Gurgaon, Faridabad, Gautam Buddh Nagar and Ghaziabad — were all constituencies the BJP hoped to win. The AAP will now pose a tough challenge in all of them. A random look at some urban seats from Mumbai, Pune, Nashik, Nagpur, Lucknow, Varanasi, Allahabad, Kanpur and Chandigarh suggests that the BJP is unlikely to get a walkover. Those who follow the BJP closely believe that the number of seats where AAP is a grave danger to the BJP is about 50.
The AAP is a threat to the BJP also in Tier-2 cities and moffussil towns. There is a large presence of idealistic youth here that used to be fertile recruiting ground for the RSS which channelised them towards Hindutva ideology. They idolised strong leaders in India’s past, from Maharana Pratap to Swami Vivekananda, and were perhaps attracted to Mr Modi and his promise of a strong leadership. Today they are more likely to identify with AAP leaders like
Mr Kejriwal, who dress and talk like them, and show that leadership qualities can lie within ordinary folk, and that a leader has to be neither “strong” nor distant like Mr Modi. Apart from straight wins, the constituencies where AAP could damage the BJP’s vote are those where the margins of victory have tended to be low. Unbelievably, Gujarat is one such state. In the last Assembly elections, the BJP’s total margin of victory in the state was less than three lakh votes while the total non-BJP vote exceeded the votes polled the BJP by more than 10 times that figure. If AAP shows the requisite gumption, Mr Modi’s march to Delhi could end in Gujarat itself.
Of course the AAP will also damage the Congress in several constituencies. But while the Congress may be reconciled to sit in the Opposition in 2014, the rise of AAP could turn Mr Modi’s prime ministerial dreams into a nightmare.
