AAP At The Grassroots And Its Big Strides In Gujarat

“We started with five people in Surat sometime around January 2018, soon after the December assembly elections in which I contested as an AAP candidate,” recalls Ram Dhaduk, now the party’s general secretary (organisation) for south Gujarat.

Dhaduk, who played a pivotal role in the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) emerging as the main opposition party in the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) elections in February 2021, in whi­ch the Congress scored a zero, adds with a smile, “We can’t be less than 2 lakh today; have lost the count.”

He says the organisation is being built brick by brick with sheer, relentless legwork of enthusia­s­tic cadres, who visit every home in every lane and bylane continuously to convince voters.

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In 2015, the Congress had won 36 seats in the SMC. In 2021, it was wiped out as AAP won 27 seats against BJP’s 93 in the 120-member SMC. The party, which had no presence in Guj­arat, won 69 seats in total, including the 27 in Surat, during the February 2021 elections for six mun­icipal corporations. This, apart from the 42 seats—31 from taluka panchayats, nine from nagarpalikas (peri-urban municipalities) and two from district panchayats—it also won then.

In October 2021, AAP won one seat in the Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation elections, against 41 by BJP and two by Congress in the 44-seat council. What is noteworthy is that its vote share was nearly 22 per cent, even though it had barely campaigned for a month. In the same month, the party bagged two other nagar panchayat seats. In all, AAP now has 72 seats in municipal corporations and various rural and semi-urban local bodies. 

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AAP Gujarat began concerted work in 2017-2018, picking up nitty-gritty issues by reaching out to people. Almost every day, the party’s cad­res are found taking up issues and holding demonstrations on streets, distributing posters and pamphlets. By the end of 2021, it had expo­sed a major state-level scam—involving paper leak in the state head clerks’ exam—forcing the exam to be cancelled and the Gujarat governm­ent to order a police investigation, in which, around 20 people were arrested.

Within a couple of months, the chairman of the Gujarat Subordinate Services Selection Bo­a­rd that was responsible for conducting the exam, was eased out following an agitation. Just before that, in an unprecedented move in December 2021, a huge contingent of AAP workers laid sie­ge to the Gujarat BJP headquarters in Gand­h­inagar, the state capital. No other opposition party, including the Congress, had dared to sto­rm a BJP office in Gujarat before.

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“They had no inkling of our programme. Police cordoned off the Secretariat building thinking we would gherao it, but we emerged from somewhere else and reached the BJP headquarters instead,” says Sagar Rabari, one of the three gen­eral secretaries of the Gujarat unit of AAP in Ahmedabad.

Rabari, who joined AAP a few months ago, is a farmer leader and has a direct connect with farmers in most districts of the state. He was previously general secretary of Khedut Ekta Manch, which is fighting major cases on behalf of farmers in the Gujarat high court.

AAP claims to have 10 lakh party workers acr­oss Gujarat, including those who are full-time, or spend 2-3 hours a day, or are available every alternate day, or who join public agitations. They maintain records of each one of them according to their availability. “We have category-wise lis­ts with names and mobile numbers. City and district in-charges have all been given an Excel sheet, which they update every day,” says senior journalist-turned-AAP leader Isudan Gadhvi, as he showed an Excel sheet on his cell phone to this reporter.

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Gadhvi’s “Mahamanthan” debate programme on Gujarati TV channel VTV was a major hit among the rural masses. Hailing from a Saurashtra far­ming family, he would often raise issues that directly touched rural populations, and is thus quite popular in Saurashtra. He has not taken any party post yet.

Sagar Rabari explains, “AAP’s missed call camp­aign was a huge success. We only publicised that those wishing to join or associate with the party should give a missed call on a dedicated mobile number. We followed up on every missed call and must have returned lakhs of phone calls. Every district unit has to send to me an update of the Excel sheet. Even if for some reason they have not been able to return a call on a particular day, they are supposed to type ‘zero call today’ and send me the sheet.”

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The missed call campaign started in Surat after AAP’s performance in the SMC elections last year.

Beginning in end-2017, Ram Dhaduk and Dha­r­mesh Bhanderi—now leader of the Opposition in the SMC—focused on residents of eastern areas like Varachha, Mota Varachha, Katargam and Ash­wanikumar, majority of whom are Patidars (Patel) from Saurashtra, mostly working as diamond polishers and cutters in Surat. Dhaduk and Bhanderi are both Patidars and hail from Saurashtra.

“There was no strategy as such, except reaching out to people and being seen continuously on the streets by highlighting local issues, and helping out locals in their day-to-day requirements via the local office,” Dhaduk explains. “Since we met people, helped them and raised their issues, many started joining AAP,” he adds.

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AAP has so far exposed 170 small-to-­­large scams in the BJP-ruled SMC over three years­—­all of them identified during their daily contact with the people. They also ran an “oxymeter campaign”, with party activists going door to door to check oxygen levels of people during the Covid-19 crisis.

“We also ran eight isolation centres for pat­ients, what with hospitals overflowing during the Covid second wave. Since the then min­ister of state for health, Kishore Kanani, was an MLA from Surat, we also put up banners and posters all over town stating that ‘Gujarat’s health minister Is missing’,” says Bhanderi. Associated with AAP right from 2012, he was AAP’s organis­ing secretary (Surat city) in the run-up to the elections.

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For the SMC polls, AAP chose candidates from among their cadre on the basis of their education level—with graduation the minimum criterion, along with speech and articulation skills, and economic affluency “since we have limited resources.”

Says Dhaduk, “Our 27 councillors would have spent less than Rs 2.5 lakh each to win.” AAP’s youngest winner was Payal Patel, 22, a promising Gujarati film actress who has featured in over 50 remix film song videos. She beat her BJP rival and sitting councilor with a huge margin of 12,000 votes. Her strategy? “I went door-to-door. There won’t be a single family in my ward (constituency) whose home I haven’t visited,” beams Payal.

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The sub-text to AAP’s Surat story is that the party was the first runner-up on as many as 40 seats in four municipal wards. “Not just Surat, we also came second in 16 seats at the Rajkot Municipal Corporation polls,” says Isudan Gadhvi.

“By now, thanks to the enthusiastic cadre—many of them self-motivated and only needing direction—we have adequate number of party workers and activists in 32,000 out of 52,000 assembly booths across Gujarat,” he adds.

So what drives these cadres? “The missed call campaign, being continuously   present among the people in the form of demonstrations, or helping them out, are key reasons why so many youngsters trust us. We look and behave as simple, ordinary people,” shrugs Sagar Rabari.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Building AAP From the Grassroots")

(Views expressed are personal)

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Darshan Desai is the editor of Development News Network (DNN), Gujarat