Can AAP’s urban strategy work in rural India?

The Delhi elections proved beyond doubt that the Aam Aadmi Party was not just figment of the media's imagination, all hype and no substance. Its tumultuous seven-week tenure might have left doubts about AAP as a party of governance but it's clear that when it comes to the campaign, noone can rule AAP out.

As the stage shifts from Delhi to India, the 543-seat question is – can AAP go national? That's where opinions are sharply divided.

AAP-fans see its David vs Goliath image working in its favour going into the national elections. After all it had shown an election could be won without mountains of black money and its candidates have been fiercely playing up the image of the outsider out to reclaim politics from fat cat netas.

"What you see is what you get," writes Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph.

The oafishness of Somnath Bharti, the inspired insolence of Kejriwal, the mincing cleverness of Yogendra Yadav, the wild-eyed gabble of Ashutosh, the smiling self-righteousness of Shazia Ilmi might infuriate or annoy, but their agenda is contained within the bounds of political reason: the abolition of corruption, the nurturing of neighbourhood politics, the calling out of crony capitalism and so on.

The established political players scoff at AAP's lack of political experience. But to its supporters that is actually an advantage. In an election that's supposed to draw record numbers of first time voters, perhaps as high as 150 million out of a 725 million electorate, its lack of political baggage can actually work in its favour. Kesavan writes that "the people who choose to vote for the AAP, won't have to step over dead bodies or skirt the rubble of sacred places or affect deafness when dog-whistles blow."

That's led political scientists like Asutosh Varshney to hazard a guess in the Indian Express that if AAP can quickly find a foothold in enough of India's 94 urban parliamentary constituencies and 122 semi-urban constituencies, it could get 30-40 seats and become the third largest party in Parliament. That's the kingmaker slot being eyed by everyone including Mamata Banerjee despite the Anna Hazare no-show at their big Ram Lila rally in Delhi.

Not so fast, cautions Hartosh Singh Bal in Caravan. He contends that one cannot extrapolate from Delhi to all the other urban centres in India quite so smoothly. In India, there is urban and there is urban. AAP's presence in the most urbanized states in India – Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala – is far more limited even though Kejriwal taking public transport can cause enormous traffic wrangles in Mumbai. Unlike Delhi, Mumbai has strong regional players in the Shiv Sena, NCP and MNS.

What's also worth noting is where AAP's success in Delhi came from. Bal writes:
The AAP's success in Delhi came largely at the expense of the Congress and the BSP, whose vote shares declined 15.3 percent and 8.8 percent respectively since the last assembly election, in 2008. (In contrast, the BJP's vote share went down by less than 2 percent.)

Bal quotes an Economic and Political Weekly analysis to say that AAP does particularly well not just when it's urban but in areas of urban concentration with a significantly high proportion of slums, mobilizing the urban poor along with middle-class support. Or as Kesavan puts it more colourfully "The muffler-wearing, tiffin-carrier carrying lower-middle class was never used as a style model by any populist party till the AAP came along."

But Bal notes that a perfect storm for a rising AAP needs a peculiar set of political factors to come together.
A two-way fight between the Congress and the BJP in urban pockets; a once substantial, even if now diminished, BSP presence; and a BJP leadership that is unable to help its party court the voters that the Congress and the BSP are shedding.

Chandigarh might be a good battleground for AAP where "no regional party is well entrenched and the BJP does not have a strong leadership" as evident from the eggs thrown by aggrieved local BJP workers at Anupam Kher and Kirron Kher but obviously that's not true across the country in all the urban constituencies.

Also Kejriwal could afford to be more meritocratic in candidate selection in a city like Delhi. In an earlier piece also for The Telegraph, Kesavan rejoiced that it "wasn't, in short, the anti-Mandal social coalition under a different name. Its success in reserved constituencies in the Delhi elections where it won the Valmiki vote and its willingness to purge itself of godmen and other majoritarian baggage, were signs of its growing inclusiveness."

But religion and caste remain much more potent in elections outside the capital.. However it's not true that Kejriwal is entirely oblivious to those pressures as well. His ambiguous stance on khap panchayats was clearly meant not to upset tempers in Haryana. India Today notes that he fielded Muslim candidates in constituencies dominated by Muslims and his party won 8 out of 13 seats dominated by his own Bania community. Hartosh Singh Bal notes that in Punjab it has tied up the United Sikh Movement, a radical religious organization led by a one-time associate of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

The big parties are relying on the fact that AAP will not be able to ramp up its infrastructure that quickly outside Delhi where it had the advantage of the history and organizing that went into Anna Hazare's Jan Lokpal movement. One BJP leader said that even though AAP numbers rose from 5,000 to 100,000 in Gujarat in December, the state BJP had been ignoring it. "Not to react is our strategy," the BJP leader told India Today. "It's the only way any government or party led by a strong leader should behave." Of course that lasted until Kejriwal took the fight almost to Modi's doorstep.

AAP's national ambitions can come apart when in its haste it allows newly-minted supporters in other states like Tamil Nadu to get into fights about who is the real AAP. Many of its middle class supporters were also turned off by the dramabaazi of Kejriwal's resignation though AAP's online donations also shot up dramatically as well.

But the biggest fear for the likes of BJP and Congress, writes Kunal Pradhan in India Today is that "what they considered their core strength – the bloated, khadi-clad loyalist who has won from the same constituency two or three times – may now be their biggest liability. That these are exactly the kind of people the public now want to defeat."

Whether AAP gets to be king, kingmaker or merely courtier in the 2014 election, it's shown one thing for sure – it can upset the best laid predictions of pundits and pollsters.