KEJRIWAL’S NEW TARGET AUDIENCE
Street theatre, corruption wars, subsidies and self-rule. The Aam Aadmi Party is narrowing its sights on a new lower middle class to expand its political base.
He may be a self-proclaimed anarchist, but Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has a remarkably clear idea about the order of things. In an interview given three months before the Aam Aadmi Party’s ( AAP) spectacular debut in Delhi, he outlined his vision for the future of AAP. “When we come to power in Delhi, it would create a huge hope and mood in the country. What we subsequently do in the next two months would then fire the imagination of people. Then the next Lok Sabha election will not be an ordinary election; it will be an extraordinary election,” he told the online portal Indiaopines.com. As AAP closes in on a tumultuous two months in government, Kejriwal’s dream is close to being fulfilled. The political stand-off with the Congress and BJP over the Jan Lokpal and Swaraj bills is only a step-up for what will follow. Observers say it is likely that Kejriwal will force himself out of power to fight the Lok Sabha elections in May.
AAP’s two-month project in Delhi has hinged on a dramatic move beyond the educated, upper middle class that brought them to power. It has now set its sights on a new aspirational class which has breached the poverty line and is now looking for a better future. A 2010 survey by the National Council for Applied Economic Research ( NCAER) identified a class of aspirers immediately below the middle class, earning between Rs 90,000 and Rs 2 lakh a year. It said their ranks increased by 12 percentage points in the past decade to form 33.9 per cent, or roughly one-third of the total population, according to the NCAER estimates.
“Evidence suggests that we are the strongest in the middle, but middle not in the sense in which the word middle class is understood, because in India, the middle class is a euphemism for the ruling class,” said party strategist Yogendra Yadav in a pre-poll interview posted on the AAP website. He estimated that while AAP was weaker in the top 10 per cent (in terms of income) and bottom 20 per cent of the population, they were strongest in the 70 per cent in between.
The party received close to 9,000 applications from prospective candidates over the past month-and-a-half, after it announced its intent to contest over 350 Lok Sabha seats across the country. “It has captured the imagination of the people,” says Anand Kumar, a national executive member, as a retired army officer comes to meet him at his Jawaharlal Nehru University home to look over an application for a Lok Sabha seat. “Just the other day, a Dalit lawyer got in touch with us and said he wanted to contest against Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav. These people are far from middle class. What is happening in Delhi is beginning to be felt across the country,” he says. An India Today Group-CVoter poll, conducted in January this year, reveals 38 per cent of respondents wanted Kejriwal as prime minister, second only to BJP’s Narendra Modi. But it is the vote of this aspirational class that AAP will bank on to create a wave of optimism across
the country and to that end, each of the party’s moves in Delhi are tailored towards a specific plan.