The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has won the Bawana assembly by-election with an impressive vote share, and its leaders and cadres are likely to see the victory as an endorsement of Arvind Kejriwal’s performance as Delhi’s Chief Minister and their party’s potential to mount a credible challenge to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress in due course of time.
However, the result shouldn’t be allowed to mask issues that the AAP continues to face, and this moment of triumph might be as good a time as any to reflect on the way forward and, in the process of such reflection, it might be appropriate to draw lessons from the experience of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
Prima facie, the BSP might seem an odd reference for the AAP to learn from. The differences between the two parties are obvious.
While the BSP – imagined as a political response to lingering and systematic Bahujan, especially Dalit, oppression – emerged after long struggle, the AAP was birthed after shorter labour and has distinctly more middle-class flavors in its leadership, priorities, and methods.
But, scratching the surface will reveal that the AAP and BSP have several things in common.
Both have harbored clear national ambitions, threatened to usurp the existing political order at some point in time, and now seem to be losing momentum. Their current situation assumes added significance amidst perceptions of a TINA (there is no alternative) factor favouring the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2019.
Of the two, it is currently the BSP that has more to worry about.
The AAP, formed just five years ago, retains the energy and optimism of a new party, and can afford to view the setbacks it had in the Delhi municipal and Punjab Assembly elections as a temporary downer. The older BSP has steadily lost ground after getting a foothold in Uttar Pradesh and a toe-hold in several other states, and can take its sliding graph lightly only at its own peril.
The Downfall of BSP
The BSP began with pockets of influence in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, gradually making inroads into neighbouring Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. It seemed poised for greater things about a decade ago – but suddenly lost steam thereafter.
At the moment, the BSP’s promising run – which began with a single-handed victory in the 2007 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections followed by peak vote shares in a series of Assembly elections till 2009 (Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan) – stands halted.
In the most recent Parliamentary election and Assembly elections in these states, its vote shares have plummeted to ‘struggle period’ levels. Given how Uttar Pradesh-centric the party has become over time, its recent performances in the state (no Parliamentary seat in 2014 and an embarrassingly low seat tally in the current Assembly) would be particularly concerning.
That the BSP’s fortunes have dipped in an era when Dalit political assertion is more evident than ever before, a process to which the party’s contribution remains undeniable, suggests its travails may owe, in significant measure, to internal infirmities.
If and when BSP supremo Mayawati reflects on her party’s arc, she is likely to rue the opportunities squandered and realise that the underlying reason lies in the party’s disproportionate focus on Uttar Pradesh and her own trust issues and (resultant) centralisation tendencies.
To the BSP, the decision to accord special attention to Uttar Pradesh and base Mayawati there would have seemed eminently sensible at one point. The state is politically important, had offered the party its first glimmer of hope and taste of power, and the party would have expected Mayawati’s ascension to the top to have great signal value for grassroots workers and core voters.
Importantly, the BSP would have hoped that a new model of governance delivered under Mayawati herself would help consolidate the gains made in Uttar Pradesh and create ripples in others.
Things have panned out differently. Sure, there was excitement in several quarters around Mayawati’s Chief Ministership, and it even spilled elsewhere. But the gains were short-lived.
Mayawati’s Micromanaging
Balancing the demands of governing Uttar Pradesh and expanding an under-resourced party would have been tough anyway, especially since a certain level of control (gate-keeping and checking of irresponsible voices) was needed to avoid dilution of party agenda and disillusionment among core voters; Mayawati’s trust issues made the task even more difficult.
Worried about the emergence of a parallel power centre in Uttar Pradesh and party colleagues running away with the space created in other states, Mayawati chose to micro-manage both government and party affairs herself, ended up being stretched and unable to do justice to either.
Not surprisingly, her stint as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, despite achievements on the critical law and order front, didn’t fetch a repeat mandate, and her party failed to build on the early momentum outside the state.
Now, Mayawati has resigned from her Rajya Sabha seat and is said to have launched a major outreach effort in Uttar Pradesh. Only time will tell whether the BSP can bounce back into the reckoning anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the BSP’s experience holds out lessons for the AAP and Kejriwal, because the AAP seems to be following the BSP path in:
a) focusing on a single state (Delhi)
(b) heeding calls for its best-known face, Kejriwal, to be confined to Delhi;
(c) Kejriwal occasionally flashing Mayawati-like streaks in his discharge of both government and party responsibilities.
The AAP’s results, expectedly, aren’t different from the BSP’s. Disappointment quickly followed euphoria in Delhi, Punjab promised much but gave little, credible individuals like Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav decided to chart their own course, divisions emerged in several state units, and the numerous enthusiastic volunteers that emerged in towns and kasbahs started retreating quietly.
What's Common Between the AAP and the BSP
Both the AAP and the BSP have:
(a) erred in assuming that their ‘special agenda of governance’ would be delivered smoothly, and that it would be enough to earn repeated electoral endorsement.
(b) miscalculated that the energies and change aspirations they have tapped will wait patiently to synchronise themselves with the party growth cycle.
c) reposed an unrealistic amount of faith in the ability of one individual to deliver on two important fronts – party stewardship and chief ministership.
In reality, special governance agendas can be thwarted by a variety of factors (from ground-level complexities to genuine capacity constraints within delivery systems to sabotage by entrenched interests), and energies and change aspirations don’t always await delayed vehicles.
If they have to be harnessed under a political umbrella, the mobilisation has to be timely, and embracing and empowering of organic, local leaderships (that is, not dictated by the pace and preferences of remote supremos).
As far as the road ahead is concerned, the one before Mayawati’s outfit is clearly the more arduous. For two reasons.
One: The BSP has flattered to deceive for a while and patience may have run out with it on ground, especially outside Uttar Pradesh.
Two: The BSP’s clear identification of its core constituency lends itself to more targeted wooing and weaning away of its voters by the opposition – a phenomenon evident in Uttar Pradesh.
These peculiar circumstances leave the BSP little choice but to focus on UP, the lowest but by no means easily accessible fruit, even if it comes at the cost of neglecting expansion plans outside UP once again.
(There can be no greater proof of how a UP focus has damaged the party. Had opportunities outside UP been pursued at the right time, the burden of re-building the party with a demotivating ‘has-been’ tag would have been avoided.)
The AAP’s support base is more amorphous and the disappointments with it relatively few- which makes the road ahead for it a little easier.
To avoid going through the pain that the BSP is currently undergoing, the AAP, for starters, either needs to free Kejriwal from chief ministership to pursue party matters or give latitude to others and let Kejriwal apply himself to his chief ministerial duties.
Both the AAP and the BSP, assuming that their national ambitions haven’t been shelved, would do well to remember that the two largest national parties in the country owe their footprint to the exertions of provincial and sub-provincial leaderships they promoted, that the Congress’ decline began when such leaders began to be ignored, and that parties that haven’t looked beyond a single, supreme leader have remained regional forces at best.
(This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same. Manish Dubey is a policy analyst and crime fiction writer and can be contacted @ManishDubey1972. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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