Its Eternal Cogs

Mad is what family and friends came close to calling Dilip Pandey when he quit a good software job that paid him Rs 4 lakh a month in Hong Kong, sold his house there and flew back to India with his wife, an eight-month-old daughter and a five-year-old son to support the Anna Hazare movement in 2011. But as the Aam Aadmi Party’s 33-year-old Delhi unit secretary puts it, “We have had too many sensible people running this country. Maybe a bunch of mad people will do a better job of it.”

Today, a few friends in Hong Kong and India support his children’s education, he has cut down his needs to the bare minimum and his family, after an initial tussle, has come to terms with Pandey’s decision. And not for a moment has he regretted his rollercoaster ride with AAP. For, from being a darling of the media, the party has been as good as written off by the mainstream media. It’s all over for AAP—khatam—smirk political rivals.

AAP has indeed come a long way from its spectacular ride to national conscio­usness last year. Delhi’s heady brush with Arv­ind Kejriwal’s promise of clean, efficient, corruption-free governance ended in two months, over his version of the Jan Lokpal, for which he wanted all or nothing. Then came the Lok Sabha election— and reality check. The party’s attempt to go national was deemed in retrospect to be premature and rushed: it won just four Lok Sabha seats, out of the many hund­red it contested. It lost all seven parliamentary seats in Delhi, and made a real impression only in Punjab (outside of the high-profile Varanasi contest where Kejriwal earned a hard-fought second place). After this demoralising show, the haemorrhaging started: dissension, desertions, a near-implosion.

Pankaj Gupta, 48, BTech, NIT, Allahabad,. Quit as head of operations, KMG Infotech, Gurgaon, National Secretary, AAP. (Photograph by Sanjay Rawat)

But if you expected the mood at AAP’s Hanuman Road HQ in Delhi to be sombre, far from it. Typical for an idealistic bunch of youngsters, they manage to eke out grounds for optimism—which indeed do exist. For one thing, there’s the fact—a counterintuitive one that most analysts missed in the ‘Tsunamo’ of May 16—that AAP actually increased its voteshare in Delhi from 29 per cent in December to 33 per cent (compared to the Congress’s 15 per cent). Which means Delhi’s elec­torate didn’t react as negatively as had been portrayed to Kejriwal’s dram­a­tic resignation on an issue of principle.

Expec­tations of a fresh Delhi election have infused fresh life into the system. Some 40-odd volunteers bustle about with sheets of paper, making notes, talking to groups of people, vigorously working on their keyboards. From analysing poll data, planning a fresh strategy, hunting for more volunteers to designing activity charts for existing ones, this is a team that’s put the past firmly behind it.

AAP is back making headlines, alleging that the BJP tried to lure Congress MLAs with bribes of Rs 20 crore each. Left with 28 MLAs in the assembly after three others got elected to the Lok Sabha, the BJP will have to go poaching, engineering a split in AAP or Congress, to have a go at staking claim. Hence the AAP charge that the BJP is more interes­ted in “poa­ching than polling”. Raising a stink is a way to pre-empt any poaching. Were AAP forced to sit in the oppo­sition for four-and-a-half years, it could lose con­siderable ground—and volunteers.

AAP is indeed staring at an existential crisis. To sustain motivation levels among its volunteers, it needs to hold out the promise of being in the game, of doing well in an election to usher in ‘change’. The volunteers Outlook spoke to say they would be with AAP as long as the party remained committed to its version of the Jan Lokpal.

Nandan Mishra, 25,  BTech, IIT-Kanpur, Quit as assistant manager, Citibank, Bangalore, Volunteer, AAP. (Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari)

“It’s true many volunteers who joi­ned after the Delhi poll have left,” says Lucknow-born IITian Nandan Mishra. But that’s because their aspirations were not satisfied and they were impatient for power, he argues. He himself is in it for the long haul, he says.

Mayank Gandhi, national executive member, waxes philosophical on the party website. People occupy different levels of human existence, he muses. There are those with an ‘I, me, myself’ attitude, then those whose “expanded consciousness” includes friends and family. AAP volunteers like him exist on the third level, he says, where they are “attentive to the world and its people”. And then the clincher: “Someone who is at a lower level will never understand one who is more evolved.”

Volunteers have left, but new ones have joined too, claims AAP. There is at least one volunteer manning 85 per cent of the 11,367 booths in Delhi. With 12,000 identified volunteers roping in at least 10 people each across 70 cons­tituencies in Delhi, AAP is convinced its stronger organisation could help it to a clear win in a mid-term poll—if no government is formed by year-end, that is. They are a factor now, AAP believes. An internal survey done by the BJP, it claims, shows they could win as many as 45 seats in the 70-member House in  a fresh election. That is why, they believe, the BJP is so keen to explore “all options at forming the government”, a euphemism for horse-trading.