Now that its leader-in-chief, Arvind Kejriwal is out of jail on bail, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) spirits have been lifted. It, however, is hard to quantify to what extent the party would benefit due to this developments in Haryana.
The North Indian state is going to polls on on October to elect 90 members to the legislative Assembly. The BJP government led by Chief Minister Nayan Singh Saini is hoping to retain power for a third consecutive term, PM Narendra Modi has already launched an aggressive campaign.
When Kejriwal, the Delhi Chief Minister was in jail, the AAP had tried hard to get just 10 of the 90 seats of the Haryana Assembly. It was to contest as an ally of the Congress as part of the INDI Alliance but the partner calculated that just six were enough.
AAP leaders took umbrage and broke its alliance and has consequently fielded 89 candidates in as many seats. It turned the event into an opportunity. It is a new plan. Not that the AAP thinks it can win more seats than the 10 it was bargaining for.
Now, with Kejriwal announcing his decision to resign as Chief Minister of Delhi and demanding elections in November instead of the scheduled February 2025 the whole political scenario could get impacted.
It is not for nothing that the Aam Aadmi Party is going alone in Haryana.
It wants to build a wider, somewhat stronger base for itself in a state that is sandwiched between Punjab and Delhi. The Party hopes its governance philosophy – health and education, and substantial subsidy in power and water charges would rub off on Haryana too.
The performance of AAP has nothing much to write about in the State. It had contested half the Assembly Constituencies in 2019 and drew a blank. Moreover, in no constituency did it score; its vote share had remained less than a single digit in percentage of the total votes polled. Nor did it upset any party’s applecart in that or the subsequent Lok Sabha elections.
However, there seems to be a strategic reason behind the move to field 89 candidates, nine times more than what it had thought was possibly a good contest against the BJP. It wants to garner some votes and spread itself because the AAP wants to build a base which it thinks would become a core team for the future.
The larger objective is also that AAP wants to retain its National Party status.That status for a 12-year-old political start-up is big. It was a State Party, according to the Election Commission norms, only in four states – Punjab, Delhi, Goa, and Gujarat. It does not want to slip from there.
The votes AAP garners in each state will turn out to be important for its growth. More the votes in each state under its belt, the better.It may be recalled that in 2023, while the ECI had revoked the national party status of Trinamool Congress, the erstwhile united Nationalist Congress Party, and the Communist party of India for the poor percentage of votes it cornered, AAP had flowered.
A National party is one which has been recognised as a State Party in at least four states. It must poll six per cent of all votes cast in four or more states in the Assembly or Lok Sabha elections. Retaining that enables a party to retain its election symbol, which in AAP’s case is the broom.
Even in cities, the retained election symbol assumes importance, not only for the illiterate.Ask any political party and it would tell you that only an election enthuses a cadre, for in-between two polls they have no work except perhaps a few agitations. The cadre want to be seen by the party bosses and hope for a personal growth with the party’s ascendance.
One may recall that in its first foray in New Delhi, AAP had not just local but support across the country, young men taking leave of absence from their work and pouring their skills in its service. Organising crowdfunding to make telephone calls, knocking on doors was what they did.However, that kind of enthusiasm and outpouring of support is missing for sometime now.
AAP has now been forced to depend on its local base, if missing, develop a new base. It is not enough for the active workers from Delhi and Punjab to campaign. Its hope is that the success in neighbouring Punjab would infect Haryana. The Party had won an impressive victory (92 of the 117 seats) in the Punjab Assembly elections in 2022 to come to power. In 2017, it had just won 20 seats to be in opposition.
However, after its poor performance in Delhi in partnership with Congress in the recent Lok Sabha elections, what matters to AAP is AAP. It wants to grow by itself, and no one can complain about it.
| Posted by News Desk | 
