Although the right-wing Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) seems to be on the brink of returning to power in India, the political event of recent times — for seriocomic disruptiveness and for being an example of the Indian electorate’s eccentric impulses — was the success of the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party, or AAP, in the Delhi assembly elections last December.
The acronym AAP is the word in most north Indian languages for the respectful form of “you”, lending it an air of direct address or even accusation, and certainly of transformation in the Rilkean sense (as the poet said in a famous sonnet, ‘You must change your life). It is a party that is said to have a single-point programme: “End corruption” (just as the Congress party’s was, for a very long time, “End poverty” — the results are plain to see).
It sprang into being from a rift within a populist anti-corruption movement of astonishing momentum steered forward by the neo-Gandhian Anna Hazare. Hazare is a septuagenarian activist whose simple air conceals an authoritarian streak. He and his cohorts have long been agitating for parliament to pass the Jan Lok Pal Bill, which would bring to the political system an independent ombudsman to curb corruption. Part of the reason Arvind Kejriwal — once one of Hazare’s closest aides, now leader of the AAP — and Hazare parted ways was because it became clear the hunger strikes Hazare had inherited from Gandhi as a political instrument were going to be ineffective in getting the bill passed. Not an agitation, but an electable party was required.
Still, the fact that Delhi’s electorate was disgusted enough with corrupt mainstream parties to make AAP the second most successful contender in December’s elections came as a surprise to most, including, no doubt, Hazare. The party formed a government in the Delhi assembly on the basis of the Congress party supporting it gingerly and equivocally. Besides perpetrating some weird populist measures as soon as they took up governance, Kejriwal and company busied themselves on the mission of passing the Lok Pal Bill. Kejriwal promised to resign if it failed to. Given the impossibility of this happening in the context of Congress’s and the BJP’s opposition, the resolution seemed like an extension of hunger-strike politics, a gesture meant to at once demonstrate spiritual fidelity to a neglected ethic, and to conveniently implode at the right moment. When the bill failed to pass, Kejriwal resigned. The AAP government lasted 49 days.
Whatever Kejriwal and company’s motives, it was one of the few times an Indian party had chosen to forfeit power on a matter of principle, though the formulation of the principle seemed doomed from the start. “Is this a feasible way of doing politics?” many people asked.
Whether feasible or not, it is clear that the AAP has brought a new note to Indian politics by drawing attention not only to corruption, but also by entirely conflating corruption with the professional politician and thereby serving notice on the category of politician itself — as if it had suddenly become an outdated concept. To be a politician by vocation and employment — one who pursues power and governance and nothing else — is bad. It follows that a degree of ineptitude (such as the AAP displayed in its brief stint in power and also in refusing to cling to it: One of the charges against it was that it was full of amateurs) must be a strength.
The AAP’s real appeal is not, then, that it is a political embodiment of an Arab Spring-style mass movement. Its achievement is that it has introduced an element of karaoke into Indian politics. It is not only a party for “common people”, it is common people. Most of its members, and, now, its electoral candidates, have never been politicians. They also robustly demonstrate that they do not quite know how to be politicians. Just as karaoke negates the professional musician in favour of a generally out-of-tune “ordinary” person, the AAP’s whole intention seems to be to detonate the politician by embracing the amateur. The gaucheness, as in karaoke, is a mysterious incarnation of democracy and form of empowerment.
This kind of democratisation has a distinct history in culture, although the AAP may be the first instance of it occurring in politics. According to the German critic Walter Benjamin, the rise of the popular novel in Europe in the 19th Century was a result of the “crowd” comprising the common man — desiring to see itself portrayed in stories and narratives.
Earlier, Benjamin says, the privilege of “seeing itself” belonged to the aristocratic elite, whose members would ritually have their own portraits painted. But by the end of the 20th Century, yet another development was shaping culture and a further line being crossed in democratisation. The common man no longer wanted to just be portrayed by artists and writers: He wanted to be the artist, even if only for a few minutes.
It was a simple desire — as simple as the 19th-Century one to be written about — and the technology that might have made this possible was at hand. Karaoke was one of the first consequences of this development. Novels by celebrities were another: These were as much propelled by the glamour of fame as they were by the possibility of eroding and interrogating the category of “writer”. Reflecting on the fact that a particular issue of the New York Review of Books had given equal space to a book by Joseph Brodsky (the poet and Nobel Prize winner) and another by Ivana Trump, the Croatian novelist Dubravka Ugresic wrote: “It would have been difficult for Brodsky to become a brilliant skier, while it was easy for Trump to go from being a skier to writer ...”
In the realm of culture, then, this new phase of self-expression has been at once liberating and disastrous. In India, in the domain of politics, you have to believe it is a good thing.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist and professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, east England.
