The Banalisation of Kejriwal and Aam Aadmi Party

The BJP broke AAP's dream of alternative politics. This democracy is majoritarian and mediocre, and the opposition is too hegemonic and patriarchal. New AAPs need to be created

- Shiv Visvanathan

The Aam Aadmi Party's defeat in Delhi has its way of showing that numbers can create their own narrative. The final result—48 to 22—reveals that the BJP overcame a deficit of nearly three decades in the capital to eventually break the phenomenon of AAP as a ‘miracle party.’ But numbers explain little of what happened. We have to go into the political dynamics of election strategies to understand how AAP was domesticated into a mediocre, marginal party that could be discarded. It involved a set of elaborate strategies.

First, the BJP had to break the myth of Arvind Kejriwal, who represented the dream of alternative politics. He was once cited in the same breath as alternative democracy movements. This dream was shattered.

There was a sense where democracy in India was being reduced to elections, and elections to a numbers game. Democracy here becomes functional, mediocre and majoritarian. Kejriwal had offered an alternative myth of politics built around a vision of citizenship, participation and a different vision of the future. The first thing the BJP did was to bifurcate the myths into an iconic Kejriwal more for academic consumption and an everyday Kejriwal caught in the mediocrity of governance and politics.

The central government did it brutally by arresting both chief minister Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia. It broke the halo of incorruptibility and disrupted the genealogical links to Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement. Kejriwal was no longer an immaculate conception, but an everyday invention. The banalisation of Kejriwal began with the arrest and suspicions swirling around it. With the two top ministers in jail, AAP was in no position to claim an alternative political path.