After victory, burden of proof now on AAP

Neera Chandhoke

Political Scientist

The citizens of Punjab have spectacularly committed regicide. This is political theatre at its best. A people who have been driven to indebtedness, drug abuse and alcoholism, who are unemployed, whose fields have been environmentally degraded, and who suffer from various maladies of the human condition, have spoken back to history. One leader after another has been defeated in own fiefdom. Will this lead to well-being? Punjabis took up arms against a sea of troubles. Will the massive mandate given to the Aam Aadmi Party end their troubles?

We should celebrate the massive victory of a new party in Punjab. The AAP has traded on the ‘Delhi model of governance’. It has aroused expectations that all problems confronting Punjabis, problems that have driven their children to take refuge abroad, will be resolved. There is cause for hope. In Delhi, the AAP has strengthened public education and health systems. Students from ‘government schools’ have topped school-leaving exams. Mohalla committees have been set up. Leaders are accessible. After the second round of Covid destroyed lives, livelihoods and families, the government has done its best to help those who survived the tragedy. Thankfully, we are not subjected to hate speech. Ministers of the Delhi government do not spend their time counting Hindus and Muslims.

Yet there is unease. The AAP speaks the language of governance. It belongs to a post-ideological world. But it is ideology that speaks of the politics of a party. Of course, a government should not be corrupt. But the political is always contested. Who contests governance and corruption? What is, then, the politics of the AAP? Across the world, governments that ban corruption happen to be police-states. Democratic states should do more, they should be able to tell us what they stand for.

It is precisely here that the AAP has faltered. It has not taken a stand on inalienable human rights, and certainly not on the right to protest the anti-CAA agitation, Shaheen Bagh, the attack on the students and faculty in Jawaharlal Nehru University in January 2020 by goons, and on manufactured communal riots in Delhi in February 2020. Can we trust it to safeguard the rights of citizens? This is what democratic governments are supposed to do. Let us not mistake the matter, authoritarian governments provide their people with social goods as a matter of social policy. What they do not do is protect basic rights and freedoms.

Worryingly on crucial issues, the AAP falls within the provenance of right-wing conservatism: public exhibition of religious rituals and Hindu religious imagery. The party articulates and implements anxious expressions of an overripe Indian nationalism, such as desh-bhakti in schools. Unthinking and excessive nationalism deflects reasoned consideration of issues, such as justice, which is crucial to the project of living together in a political community. On nationalism, we should take our cue from Rabindranath Tagore. “I am willing to serve my country,” states Tagore’s protagonist Nikhil in Ghare Baire, “but my worship I reserve for Right, which is far greater than any country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.” Rabid nationalism, if employed in the wrong cause, or if harnessed to defend and rationalise institutionalised injustice, can cause more harm to the nation and to its people, than critical interrogation of the project. Let people relate to the nation in their own way. Leave them and their nation alone.

Finally, the AAP has failed to build up a party organisation. It remains a one-man party. Ministers and senior colleagues hail the leader with as much fervour as ministers of the Modi Cabinet hail the Prime Minister. If AAP wants to be a party with a difference, it should begin to institutionalise organisations that facilitate democratic interaction with its cadre and with the people. Let them hold the leader accountable, let them challenge him, grill him and offer alternatives. In short, the party should take care not to slide into a durbar. The Congress has withered for this precise reason. The BJP is better off because a disciplined cadre of the RSS mobilises people, howsoever pathetically undemocratic this mobilisation may be.

If the AAP wants to govern Punjab well, and sort out some, if not all, of its problems it should hasten to construct and strengthen a party organisation. Consultation through phone calls is bad politics, democratic decentralisation is good politics. What Punjab needs is good politics, responsive politics, democratic politics, not a politics that circles around a supreme leader. Let AAP not subordinate the hopes of Punjabis to one individual, or even a collective. Punjab has suffered enough, it is time to restore a state that was once the pride of India to its former glory. But nothing can be done unless the party that rules it is democratic, and unless the leader is a statesman. Statesmen do not practice demagoguery. They practice the art of listening to the people and responding to them effectively. They heal wounds, not inflict more harm. This is the difference between statesmen and rabble-rousing politicians.

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