Will the Aam Aadmi Party repeat its magic or are Delhi voters going to reprimand it for party chief Arvind Kejriwal’s maverick 49-day chief ministership in the upcoming state assembly elections? Search for the answer led me to party ideologue Yogendra Yadav, who appears to have some justification and back-of-the-envelope calculations to suggest that his party stands a chance, despite rival Bharatiya Janata Party's surge in other recent state polls.
After a month-long effort to meet, we are finally at Veda, a dimly-lit but slick north Indian restaurant in the heart of Connaught Place, chosen by me because Yadav wanted ‘Hindustani’ food.
Yadav, 51, walks in accompanied by an assistant. His beard is starting to grey and his salwar kameez is the same colour, a departure from the starched, sparkling white that is the favoured colour of the Indian politician. The distinction in clothing is one sign of how AAP leaders are different from other political parties, and Yadav himself couldn’t resemble the run-of-the-mill politician less. He lacks the spurious glibness that seasoned politicians acquire and has a penchant for being startlingly honest at times.
Despite his and his party’s association with the common man or aam aadmi, Yadav now enjoys celeb status. He is immediately spotted by the restaurant manager, who appears to be an AAP supporter and requests him to take care of water and electricity problems in his area. This is typical -- after all, AAP won 28 seats out of 70 seats in Delhi, its debut election, based precisely on these two issues and on the crest of an anti-corruption wave following a prominent campaign by activist Anna Hazare.
Overwhelmed, Yadav earnestly promises to help. After a moment’s pause, we order ginger fizz and kokum fizz for drinks and paneer tikka and lasooni chicken for starters.
Were responses like those of the restaurant manager enough for AAP to ride back to power, I ask Yadav. Yes, he says, but his body language does not exude the same confidence. His calculations are simple. “We gained around three per cent more votes in Delhi in the Lok Sabha elections than the assembly elections and this was at the height of the Narendra Modi wave,” he says.
READ: Beating the BJP in Delhi is doable for AAP
The AAP vote share was 33.06 per cent and 29.64 per cent for Delhi in the Lok Sabha and assembly elections, respectively. This means two things for the party, Yadav continues. First, it added new voters to the kitty despite many mass desertions following Kejriwal’s abrupt, ill-advised resignation. Secondly, AAP hopes to win support from those people who think the BJP is good at the Centre and AAP is better for running the Delhi administration.
Theoretically, this sounds reasonable to me but, I point out, things are not as clear as they appear. AAP still has a huge gap to bridge to even get close to the BJP, which scored 46.63 per cent of the votes, around 13 percentage points more than AAP in Delhi. All the AAP candidates lost their respective elections with margins of at least 100,000 votes in the seven seats they contested in the national capital. Moreover, there is no guarantee that AAP will be able to retain its existing voters in the sweeping Modi wave that has helped the BJP win Maharashtra and Haryana for the first time.
”The BJP has no face in the elections whereas Arvind Kejriwal is our leader and chief ministerial candidate,” Yadav counters as he, interestingly, uses a fork and knife to savour the paneer tikka, which turned to be a treat. Yadav is a teetotaller and vegetarian. His children and wife, on the other hand, adore fish and mutton. “If one of the spouses is Bengali, the house usually follows Bengali culture,” he jokes.
Like most Delhi restaurants, Veda is noisy but the chatter and cacophony don’t seem to bother Yadav. He continues explaining his party’s chances. His hopes are pinned on the assumption that India’s grand old party, the Congress, will shrink further from its 15.22 per cent (during the Lok Sabha polls in Delhi) vote share to merely 5 per cent and most of the benefit will fall in AAP’s favour. Lastly, the party is eyeing the Muslim and Dalit voters, who constitute a significant chunk of Delhi voters.
”Delhi elections are more about class than caste. People who eat in such restaurants are not our voters, paying a little more for water and electricity doesn’t matter to them. Our real supporters are rickshaw pullers, vendors and hawkers,” he adds.
We place our order for the main course. For the AAP ideologue it is tadka dal (yellow lentil), mirchi baigan salan (chilli eggplant curry) and a garlic naan (bread). His assistant and I go for the handi lazeez chicken, oregano naan and plain roti. The dal and chicken are good, the salan average though spicy enough to make Yadav lightly perspire, even though he partakes sparingly of the food.
I tell him that people are feeling cheated by AAP’s decision to quit power so quickly, and the sporadic agitations by a government in power – Kejriwal’s vigil outside Rail Bhawan last winter being a notable example -- also soured the voters’ mood. Yadav admits to the mistakes but I think he is less convincing when explaining why voters will choose AAP again. “People are willing to give us a second chance on the condition that we don’t repeat those mistakes,” he adds, before pausing to eat.
In the past year, the party and its leaders have matured and learnt how to handle things, he insists. “Our people have learnt how to deal with the media well. They reacted impulsively earlier,” he says, referring to infighting in AAP. Many leaders, including Yadav, had voiced concerns about the way Kejriwal ran the show. “We went through a rapid transition and could not fine-tune the decision-making process,” he adds. The leader, despite differences, gives credit to Kejriwal for converting momentum into a political party and calls him a “great strategist” who can see things through and lauds his ability to take the party forward.
While we’re at it, Yadav takes the opportunity to flay the media for accentuating the differences within his party. A certain section of the media is biased and running a hidden agenda at the behest of some people, he tells me darkly. Which prompts me to ask how AAP was different from any other party when it shunned media scrutiny and declined to reveal internal surveys of seats projections as it had done in the past. His answer surprises me, considering he was a respected psephologist before joining AAP. “I personally think it was a wrong decision. A political party should not be in the business of projecting its winning numbers, it should rather be in the business of fighting elections,” he says.
All the same, yesterday’s rookie party is clearly seeking to grow up. AAP has now changed from being an alternative to the ruling dispensation to becoming politically viable by making small compromises here and there to recapture power first in Delhi and then in other parts of the country, Yadav says. The quest for both viability by being less agitationist and learning the art of governance is very much alive.
Like any journalist, I stay the pesky course. What if, despite the change of course, the people still reject them in the Delhi assembly elections? Yadav says they are going to stay and cannot be written off easily. “I think Modi and the BJP are going to stay for some time, but I sense an opportunity here.”
AAP wants to fill the vacuum that is being created in the opposition ranks with the gradual decimation of the Congress in the country. The novice party dreams of becoming the principal opposition if not in numbers then at least through its anti-corruption rhetoric.
”We will not criticise the Modi government for his good work. But whenever there are anti-people polices, we will protest strongly,” Yadav adds in best Party Ideologue mode.
Every answer only makes me more curious. As the meal draws to an end, I ask him if he actually does have an army of volunteers to protest on the ground. And what about high-profile people such as Captain Gopinath, the aviation businessman, who quit the party?
”These people joined AAP in the television studios and left us there,” Yadav quips in reply. As an exit line, that, at any rate, is a winner.
