AAP turns out to be the David that felled the Delhi Goliaths

It is a measure of the blitzkrieg of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that despite being yet confined to Delhi its rise is almost as big a story as the failure of the Congress. The AAP, to be clear, is a potentially transformative and welcome paradigm in Indian politics. Were the fledgling party to have fared poorly, it would still have been called a progressive force. Take just one facet, how it went about collecting funds. To have every donor listed on its website was an exercise so contrary to established norms that it would merit cognizance on its own. And AAP says it ran the whole election on a corpus of a mere Rs 20 crore, and also stopped taking contributions once that figure was reached. This strikes at the root of corruption endemic in our polity. Unaccounted political funding is the base of the pyramid when it comes to the malaise of corruption in India. When parties collect and spend money in a non-transparent way, the graft spreads its tentacles to other sections of polity, suborning governance.

AAP has won, if not the right to form the government in Delhi, as much a moral victory as an electoral one by taking on the established heavyweights, and basically shocking the wits out of them. The second, and equally significant reason to applaud AAP is that it seems to have broken the competitive identity management paradigm of the established parties. Here, in a politicised, class, caste, community-disparate place like Delhi, people clearly have voted across those lines for AAP, on issues. It has reminded other parties of what ‘grassroots connect’ used to mean. The implications of this achievement are quite potent.

Disaffection against established parties is no reason to downplay AAP’s success. The party has earned the right to be respected, and the status of a state party. Well done!