Delhi dharna: AAP failed to take the lower classes with them

by Saroj Giri

For a change, AAP had finally 'gone crazy'. In taking the entire state government to a protest by night, promising the 'government from the streets' to be indefinite protest, AAP very much acted like it has no clue where it is headed. Many of its vocal, 'thinking' middle class supporters were scratching their heads and thinking that they had miscalculated in voting this party to power. Big media was already turning its back on AAP.

However, Kejriwal's protest enthused the lower classes. AAP supporters from lower income areas of Delhi were increasing while middle class professionals were shying away. It is true that Kejriwal's own demands for the suspension of the policemen clearly was trying to tap middle class anger about corruption in the police. However in spite of AAP, the poor saw a different aspect of it, a different need to corner the police. Here was a chance for AAP to allow a true articulation of lower class agency and challenge middle class hegemony, but it happily let slip away.

The upper middle class might have problems with corruption among the police but they do not face police brutality - harassment, torture and intimidation. This is, however, the everyday reality for the poor and lower classes, particularly those in 'unauthorised colonies' or among 'Bangladeshi migrants' or lower class Muslims. Near Delhi, in Gurgaon-Manesar, 148 Maruti workers are in jail in framed charges even as scores are on the 'to be arrested' list of the police. AAP pays lip service but refuses to take this issue seriously even though Maruti workers have approached the leaders.

Arvind Kejriwal at his dharna. Naresh Sharma/Firstpost.

Kejriwal's protests gave the poor a chance to recount their experience:  'When people die here, the cops don't come but the moment someone starts construction, the beat constable turns up asking for money'. This is the experience of regular harassment by police faced by the poor and the lower classes who have to do 'construction' just to provide a roof over their heads. And here the problem is not the police per se but the rich and poor divide - which has little to do with the much feted corruption and has everything to do with inequality and capitalism.

Kejriwal's demand for punishing the police officers had a very different, more middle class orientation. And the Khirki case involving African residents, it was downright racist and right-wing. But the poor were seeing it in a different light - they found their own anger against the police expressed in Kejriwal's protests which Kejriwal himself seemed to have no clue about. There was a chance that Kejriwal's dharna could go in a different direction, now with the involvement of the poor and the lower class on an agenda which could be their's and not a mobilisation on an essentially middle class agenda, which has been mostly the case so far.

However, that was not to be. As soon as it properly dawned on the AAP leadership that they are now losing middle class support and big media is looking the other way, they wound up their 'anarchism'. Big capital interests too could not be affected - hence ex-Infosys Captain Gopinath's dissent about the dharna must have influenced the course of events.

Kejriwal's dharna could have been successful if only he was interested in giving real voice to the poor and the lower classes -- a different kind of a 'success' which would involve alienating the upper middle classes and the big media. He had inadvertently taken the right step, even though his motivations were perhaps purely to embarrass the Congress or to steal the limelight from Modi's campaign. He was surely spot on to declare that the Republic Day parade is a show of VIP culture and that the real republic will be amassing people into the Rajpath.

Indeed why should the muscular display of guns and big missiles, or of showpiece culture from the states, have anything to with a vibrant people's republic. Instead a real republic of the people must be constituted, outside of the Constitution which is what 26th January wants to celebrate. Let us have a left wing republic dislodging the bourgeois Indian constitutional order, not just 'giving voice' to the poor and the working classes but where they 'take over'. Not some secular and democratic order (as against some textbook 'sectarian communal order') but an end to the rule of the propertied classes (the real way to end the very possibility of a 'sectarian communal order') and the idea of India. Let us here also finally go beyond the secular-communal divide - not in the direction of 'good governance' and 'transparency' but towards a new republic.

However, it is clear that AAP does not want to consolidate lower class support and power. It does not want to stay with the lower classes, only solve their 'problems'. This solutionism of AAP runs counter to treating the poor as real political subjects. AAP mobilised the poor to enervate upper middle class hegemony against the established parties whose hegemony in turn consisted of fixing (not mobilising) the poor in the subsidy model. One hegemony mobilised, the other immobilised the poor.

In thus mobilising and activating the lower classes, AAP hates the khas admi, 'VIP culture', but does not allow these classes to build their own power, their own organisations. It wants to retain the propertied classes and imagines it can magically curtail their powers. It wants to keep the masses in a state of splintered mobilisation, a movement of the people aimed at winning popular consent for those in power. The lower classes are kept wedded to the forms of power and state machinery of the upper classes. A clean and corruption free society becomes a way to keep the lower classes mired in social conservatism and the social power of community elites. The righteousness of anti-corruption ultimately immobilises the lower classes.

AAP mid-wifes a process where a mobilised mass replenishes the veins and arteries of a repressive capitalist order choking in its own corruption, with fresh blood, with lower class agency. Vampirish capital now is ensured a supply of what Marx 'living labour'. Hence corporate capital asks: will AAP help 'reboot India'? Mass mobilisation and plebeian politics, in a word, 'living labour' here becomes 'the power of Shunya' - the decimation and invisibilisation of precisely living labour or its enchainment to 'wage slavery'.

Mobilise labour, extract surplus but decimate its independent political power - this formula is what got disrupted with Kejriwal's anarchic misadventure.  Now that the AAP has formed a government, the middle class and the radical entrepreneurs like Gopinath or the 'clean capital' of Infosys want business as usual.

However the poor who everyday face harassment from the police and cannot be satisfied by mere anti-corruption want the struggle to continue. This is where we see that AAP and in particular its leadership is giving in and finally revealing how much their movement is dependent on the resources of the middle class and the big media. That the moment the movement goes towards real radical ends, when far more basic classes could have joined this movement, we see it drifting towards a closure and a reversal back to the capitalist mantra of 'good governance'.

Precisely the blacks of Delhi, the working classes and perhaps the hijras who face police brutality could have joined Kejriwal's protest and ushered in a real republic. But he feared precisely that and the resultant 'alienation' of the well heeled classes. So now he can continue the elitist administrative talk about the powers and freedoms of the Delhi Police. And he can now deliver 'good governance' and 'transparency' and make his chosen constituency happy.