(Ashutosh joined the Aam Aadmi Party in January 2014. The former journalist took on former Union minister Kapil Sibal and Health Minister Harsh Vardhan in the national election from Chandni Chowk in Delhi.)
Long ago when the crisis in AAP had just erupted, I had tweeted, that "It's a clash of ideas, it's a clash between ultra leftism and the new idea of welfarism." Very recently, I was once again asked by a very senior and respected journalist "What is the ideology of the party?" The occasion was the launch of my book - The Crown Prince, The Gladiator and The Hope. Arvind Kejriwal was there on the dais. This is a question all of us have been asked over and over again since the inception of the party. And a section of the intellectual class wants the whole world to believe that AAP can't be taken seriously, as it does not have a coherent ideology; these gentlemen would like to rubbish us as a short-term phenomenon whose longevity can't be predicted, as only those whose existence is backed by a strictly-defined ideology can boast of sustainability.
This question will resonate even more in coming days as the so called "ideological Godfathers" of the party are trying to carve a separate path for themselves. The genesis of this question goes back to the intellectual class whose discourse has been dominated by left-wing thinking. Their softer variant, socialism, has also contributed its bit in this endeavor. The communist manifesto was probably the first coherent ideological document which tried to answer every question of social-political-relevance; Left ideologies dominated the world discourse for a very long time, and helped capitalism reform and evolve with a human face. But just like a tragedy, the Left degenerated into an ideology which completely discarded the human as a unit of the universe. Human rights had no recognition, liberty and freedom of mind and soul was robbed in the name of communist party. No wonder by the end of 20th century, the Left evaporated from the global mind space and those who survived are today practicing capitalism in the garb of communism. In China, Leftism is only in name. Even Mao has been banished from the party document.
In India, the Left as a political force was always a fringe player, confined to one or two states. Socialism was of course was very powerful at one given point of time. Socialists were the second-largest force after the Congress during the first parliamentary elections. But lack of discipline, egotism of its leaders and impatience, and no desire to work on the party structures led the socialist movement adrift and made it disintegrate. Though its remnants still exist, now it would be a crime to even call them socialists. All of them have turned into private limited companies with the ilk of Mulayam and Lalu Yadav as their exponents. This was the same socialist movement which had given the concepts of "anti-Congressism and backward politics" which weakened the Congress. But in the 21st century, both Leftism and Socialism have lost value for the new generation, as they failed to change themselves with the changing realities.
Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav represent leftism and socialism in their own ways in the same order. Since they were perceived as architects of the ideological edifice of the party, AAP was treated by the intellectual class as a party with new ideas, but burdened with the baggage of the past. It was viewed as a party which is anti-development and does not believe in the holistic economic growth of the country. AAP's victory gave the Sensex and big industry big heart attacks. AAP was ridiculed as a party that promoted a subsidy economy. Arvind has said so many times that AAP believes in the market economy, it believes that the government has no business to be doing business, and can at best act as a facilitator. It believes that unless the government helps create an environment in which the entrepreneur can unleash his energy, there is no future for the country. But time and time again, his voice has been drowned in the larger misplaced perception about the party that it adheres to outdated ideologies and promotes old ideas.
The world has changed a lot in the last few decades. Ideology has given way to new aspirations, shaped by technology which offers the eternal freedom to communicate. Today there is hardly any difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the USA, and the same applies to the Tories and the Labour in the UK. Except for the minority policy, no discernible difference can be detected in the Congress and the BJP. In fact the Modi government looks like an extension of the Manmohan Singh regime. There is hardly any difference in their policy formulations. For the global citizens, what matters is delivery. Nobody understood it better than Deng Xiaoping, the supreme leader of China. He used to say, "It does not matter if cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." Don't forget that he was the original revolutionary along with Mao who once had said in 1974, "I have never attended a university but I have always considered that since the day I was born, I have been in the University of Life." The romantic revolutionary of 1949 was a realist in 1979 when he took the reigns of the party and the rest, as they say, is history.
The present crisis in AAP is an opportunity to get rid of misplaced perceptions. This is an opportunity to reposition AAP as a brand. AAP's great attraction lies in its fight against corruption and the hope of millions that AAP will make the system transparent and accountable. If AAP gets imprisoned in any particular "ism", then it will be the death of the idea which has made AAP so popular and which has brought a paradigm shift in Indian polity. So let's get rid of the OLD and rediscover the NEW.
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