An Extraordinary Election

My Mirror column:

Three years after AAP won a historic mandate in Delhi is a good time to watch Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s documentary on Kejriwal and the rise of his party.

On 10 February 2015, the Aam Aadmi Party won the Delhi elections with an unprecedented 67 out of 70 seats, forming a state government that is still going strong. The barrage of repetitive messaging nowadays, on television and on social media, makes it difficult for anything or anyone in the public eye to remain fresh for too long.

Arvind Kejriwal has certainly suffered from our jadedness. But three years after the AAP’s historic win, watching Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s gripping documentary An Insignificant Man makes clear just how remarkable an achievement the AAP is.

Ranka and Shukla’s film (free to watch online) quickly places on record certain landmark moments: Kejriwal’s decision to leave his job as a tax official and become an activist, his participation in the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement, and the formation of the party in November 2012. Then it takes us through the AAP’s first campaign, for the Delhi elections of December 2013.

History seen in retrospect can seem inevitable. But in 2013, for a party of political outsiders barely a year old, to fight an election in the nation’s capital, defeating the three-time-incumbent Congress Chief Minister Sheila Dixit while matching a rising BJP, seemed like a fool’s errand. Over and over, Ranka and Shukla zero in on this fact of Kejriwal’s being an outsider not just to politics, but to power as we have come to imagine it in post-independence India.

Early in the film, for instance, at a campaign meeting, a volunteer tells Kejriwal he’ll give up his job at Barclays Bank to help fight the election. Watching “such a small man – duble patle aadmi – exposing such powerful people, sahi mein bahut josh aa jata hai [one really feels inspired],” the man says. The implicit contrast with Narendra Modi’s strong man image – physically symbolised in the vision of his 56-inch chest – could not be more striking.

But as the film also makes amply clear, Kejriwal’s size and body language belies the strength of his opinions and the clarity of his political strategy. In one tense moment, an AAP candidate called Akhilesh has received two stitches for a head injury caused by being beaten up by the goons of a rival political party in the presence of the police. AAP volunteers say they did not fight back, only tried to protect themselves – and also protested outside the police station. “Don’t ever protest outside a police station,” says Kejriwal immediately. “That’s their battleground. Ours is amid the people. We have to pull them towards ours, not get drawn into theirs.” The unspoken metaphor is a profoundly Indian one: a kabaddi game.

In another great scene, Kejriwal meets a volunteer whose project is to get a thousand girls married off, free of cost. Kejriwal’s response is immediate. “First we suck the blood of the poor, then we make donations,” he laughs. “Say we get a thousand girls married. What if we increase their income instead?”

It is interesting that he does not take on the fact of gender frontally. He does not say to this man, “I don’t believe that getting girls married off is the solution to their lives.” Instead he challenges the wider approach of “daan-dakshina”: “Sure, systemic change is long-term work, but someone has to do it,” he smiles broadly. “On charity work, count me out... Jahan pe ladna-katna-marna hai, main aapke saath khada hoon.” In a society where most Indians are not about to support the idea of their daughters staying single, Kejriwal’s response struck me as shrewdly political – yet one that I don’t have trouble getting behind.

The AAP campaign places electricity and water charges – perhaps for the first time ever – at the centre of an election. Allegations of corruption against Dixit’s government are many, but the film zeroes in one particular Dixit letter that Kejriwal acquires a copy of, which prevented the 2010 head of DERC, Delhi’s electricity board, from reducing electricity prices for consumers. We watch as AAP’s core poll promises (700 litres of free water to each family, and the reduction of electricity bills by half) are deliberated within the party, challenged even by well-wishers. (They have since been met.)

The film tracks the difficulties of battling such entrenched interests. A long-time anti-corruption activist, a feisty young candidate called Santosh, whose work threatens the local powersthat-be, is knocked off her scooter by a car and dies in hospital. (Her death remains unsolved.) Then, right before the election, a video clip surfaces purportedly showing AAP candidate Shazia Ilmi agreeing to do a favour in return for money – the journalist who released it, Anuranjan Jha, later accepted it was “edited”.

Despite all this, an election in which the India Today ORG-MARG poll predicted only 6 seats for AAP ended with them getting 28. The BJP got 32 instead of the predicted 41, but decided to let AAP form a government, which ended up being dissolved by Kejriwal in two months on the issue of the stalled Lokpal Bill. It took until February 2015 for AAP to come back to power, with a much stronger mandate that has since made the party the focus of concerted, vindictive action by the Centre, with the office of the LG being used to block key Delhi government policies, including anti-corruption measures.

The film also reminds us of a political moment already almost impossible to remember, when a Sheila Dixit could dismiss a Kejriwal with the barest of courtesy. “What is Arvind Kejriwal’s status, except that he keeps talking about himself?” scoffs Dixit at one point. Even on election eve, she remains imperiously scornful, “Don’t speak to me of Kejriwal. Woh ek kahani thhi, khatam ho gayi. [That was a story, it has ended.]”

Whatever happens to the AAP in the future, at least that statement is not true.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Feb 2018.

Picture This: Chasing Politics

Last Saturday's BLink column: 

Following Shazia Ilmi through the 2013 Delhi assembly election, a new documentary offers a glimpse into the struggles of the Aam Aadmi Party. 

Lalit Vachani’s 2015 documentary An Ordinary Election, shot in the run-up to the 2013 Delhi assembly elections, tracks politician Shazia Ilmi’s campaign in south Delhi’s RK Puram constituency. Screened last week in Mumbai, Kolkata and at least three different venues in the Capital, the film attracted an audience largely comprising activists, journalists and academics. While Vachani could not have predicted it, the fact that Ilmi left the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in May 2014 and joined the BJP in January 2015 (after losing the RK Puram seat narrowly to the BJP contender) forms an overarching frame for the way we view the film. And given that the much-publicised exit of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan from the AAP Executive Council was taking place the week Vachani chose to screen his film, many saw it as a prescient comment on the AAP’s present.

From the start, when we see Ilmi alone in a seemingly empty room, being recorded for TV even as she is recorded for Vachani’s film, it is clear that she is a creature of the camera. As The Economic Timesrecognised in a 2011 profile of her, “being on TV is Ilmi’s core competence.” Having worked as a political correspondent and news anchor for 15 years, Ilmi “is not flustered by rudeness, can shout as loudly as necessary to gain the anchor’s attention, speaks fast and without gaps so that others can’t sneak in parallel commentary, appears to have a cultivated disregard for punditry, and has the rare capacity to smile beatifically for the entire duration of the debate.”

We have had more occasions to watch Ilmi in action since, and Vachani shows her putting these impressive abilities to use on the campaign trail, continuing to hold the beatific smile while being told by a Vasant Vihar uncle that she should have stayed a journalist, or hearing the news of her electoral defeat. In a Q&A after one Delhi screening, Vachani said that he considered tracking at least one other candidate, perhaps from another party, but for various reasons, including budgetary constraints, decided to stick with Ilmi, whom he knew from her student days at Jamia Millia Islamia. (Vachani now teaches courses on documentary at the University of Göttingen, Germany.) But while he makes good use of his unfettered access to Ilmi, and her ease before the camera, he spends equal time talking to her three different campaign managers and volunteers, providing a rare picture of AAP from the inside out — a point I shall return to.

A documentary doesn’t have to lay out its arguments like a thesis does, which can be a strength. But the two axes along which Vachani’s interests lie seemed clear to me: religion and class. Religion is perhaps the more obvious one, given that Ilmi, whose name identifies her as Muslim, was standing from a constituency where only 4.5 per cent of the population is Muslim. AAP’s choice was a rejection of vote bank politics, and Ilmi repeatedly appeals to voters to see her as ‘just a citizen’ rather than a ‘Muslim face’. What the film also catches, though, is Ilmi’s cleverly multifarious presentation of self, in which references to biryani (cooked by one of her poorer constituents) sit side by side with remarks that project a subliminal Hindu worldview: “Jab bahut zyada adharm badh jaata hai, toh safai ke tareeke hote hain”. In one revealing scene, she does not contradict a temple priest who says, “Brahmin prasann honge toh bhagwan prasann honge (If Brahmins are pleased, god will be pleased too)”. When she then leans over to whisper in his ear, “My mother-in-law is Brahmin,” it is difficult not to think of it as political opportunism, especially in the light of Ilmi’s future actions.

As for class, the film shows Ilmi traversing the constituency of RK Puram, which consists of middle-class government quarters, jhuggis, as well as posh colonies. She is self-possessed and gracious wherever she goes, though her appeals to middle and upper middle-class voters rang truer for me than her attempts to learn Tamil from Tamil-speaking slum-dwellers, which evoked an Indira Gandhi style of politics. What is harder to pinpoint — and yet crystal-clear as you watch the film — is how class operates as a dividing line within the party, causing invisible fractures that eventually break the campaign, damaging Ilmi’s chances. We see the removal of two campaign managers. The first, Omendra Bharat, an IIT graduate and an inspired orator, is replaced by Siddharth (no last name), another computer engineer, who lasts until a TV sting shows him willing to accept donations without receipts. (The sting was later dismissed as manufactured.) Anjana Mehta, who replaces Siddharth, comes across as a much-more English-speaking figure, who dismisses both Omendra and Siddharth as “pontificating” rather than working, and casts aspersions on their loyalty. Vachani captures the anger of several volunteers who believe that these decisions were taken undemocratically, including Mohanji, who stops working in protest, only to return once Ilmi leaves.

One revealing disagreement breaks out over why Ilmi should be called ‘Ma’am’ rather than by her first name. Gender, of course, is the elephant in the room. Ilmi talks of men’s inability to deal with a woman as boss. Omendra’s carload of campaigners is entirely male and North Indian, while Siddharh is quoted as unselfconsciously saying that whatever money he spends on AAP, “it’s still cheaper than dating girls”. AAP’s brilliantly energetic 2015 campaign revealed a party so astute about class as to successfully make it the unifying election plank so many have failed at. Watching Vachani’s film, though, one worries that it cannot prevent itself from being riven by it.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.

Post Facto -- Mufflers, jhadoos, onions and metros: symbolic politics in our time

My Sunday Guardian column this month:

On 10th February 2015, as news began to come in of the AAP win in Delhi, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp were flooded with jokes. The best of these one-liners drew on symbols: the ordinary muffler weighing heavy on the bespoke pinstripe suit, or the jhadoo's clean sweep: "Modi wants a Swachh Bharat. AAP has the broom".

Of course, politics everywhere throws up symbols. But the Delhi elections turned bitter symbolic battles into smart, vibrant politics. The muffler made him seem like a chowkidar, went the sharply classist refrain in 2013. But the more Kejriwal-mockers made fun of his ever-present muffler, the more he clung to it. And eventually some clever young things in AAP turned the name "Mufflerman" into a kind of indigenous Dilli superhero — complete with T-shirts. As for the jhadoo, rarely has there been an Indian election in which the allotted symbol of a political party has assumed such far-reaching metaphorical meaning. The AAP jhadoo is now so profoundly linked to the party's "clean up the system" discourse that the anti-corruption message seems inextricable from the visual cue for cleaning up.

And yet the thing about images is that they can signify different things to different people, and mean many things at the same time. Days before the election, I happened to hear one of the city's cultural czarinas talking about how the visual matters in every field. Her example, but naturally, came from her driver, who had apparently said that Arvind Kejriwal and his message resonated with him to a great extent, but he could not bring himself to vote for AAP because its symbol – the broom – seemed to him to represent everything he had managed to leave behind. The visual association, in other words, was powerful enough to negate the effect of an otherwise convincing verbal campaign.

I don't know anything about the driver's background, but it seems unlikely that he was responding to the broom's valence as an instrument for cleaning. He was identifying it with those who usually wield it – not as a political weapon, but as a necessary act of earning their livelihood. Such are the powerful ways in which caste lives on in this country. Jhadoo dena remains an indelible Indian shorthand for manual labour in general, and polluting labour in particular. Those who followed the anti-reservation campaigns of a few years ago would remember students in front of AIIMS, would-be doctors who would eventually have to render service to human bodies in advanced stages of decay, protesting against the terrible fate that threatened them by sweeping the streets with brooms. And on 10th February this year, there was a WhatsApp joke doing the rounds: "Zadu wala becomes CM. Chay wala becomes PM. We Graduate, Engineers & MBA thinking of how to catch train at 8.37 AM & PM".

The Delhi election has been a turning point in many ways, but the real cleansing of our minds will need something more than empty Swachch Bharat slogans.

What is clear, though, is in a country so sharply fractured by class, symbols can go either way. While being a chaiwala's son definitely helped Modi win the votes of the poor in May 2014, it is not that aspect of him that appeals to "Graduate, Engineers and MBA" – though it seems that a ten lakh rupee suit might have swung too far in the opposite direction. And if the jhadoo's power is its everydayness, its familiarity, its emblematic connection with the poorest, then it also stands to be rejected for those very reasons — by that steadily increasing section of the population that aspires to something less every day, less basic, less poor.

Two other anecdotes might make the point better. The first is from a heritage walk I went on the day after the election. It was a young, upper middle class crowd, but for once, politics was on everyone's mind. The AAP enthusiasts may have been slightly more vocal, but I managed to overhear two twenty-somethings confirm their hopes of a BJP win. "The other night I saw a whole TV programme about the price of onions," sniggered the young man. "Imagine what will happen if AAP wins!" The price of onions, while it thankfully still has enough weight to swing the electoral taraazu, is something these young people think of as ridiculous.

The second anecdote is from the last day of campaigning. I was taking the metro from RK Ashram Marg towards Connaught Place when I saw a burly forty-ish Sikh man loudly accosting a group of AAP volunteers with caps. Apparently he'd seen one of them hawk and spit on the platform. I couldn't tell who the chastised volunteer was, but a whole host of his colleagues were apologising profusely: "He didn't know the rules, he's from outside, in fact he's from Andhra. But of course he shouldn't have done it. Humne samjha diya hai..." Sardarji, however, was not to be placated so easily. "You people want to run Delhi!" he raged. "But this is the respect you show to the metro. How will you ever make it a world class city!"

Whether it's onions or the metro, no symbol can ever represent any reality fully. But some symbols aren't interested in reality. What they want to do is to present an image whose grandeur people might aspire to — like a naam-wala suit, or a shiny new metro. The power of such symbols lies precisely in their distance from the real. In the politics of symbols, then, we must choose whether we want to be represented by our aspirations or our realities. Might our leaps not be more successful if we start with the ground beneath our feet?

First published in the Sunday Guardian.