The sweeping victory of the aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Delhi state election, winning 67 of the 70 seats in the legislative assembly in early February, signals a tectonic shift in Indian politics. The BJP which won a spectacular victory in the General Election of May last year, was reduced to three seats while the 130-year-old Congress Party scored a round duck. These dramatic electoral victories and reverses indicate that none of the leaders of the major political parties which continue to practice traditional vote bank politics, adequately understand that the ground has shifted hugely beneath their feet. For one, with post-independence India™s family planning (birth control) programme having failed due to the criminal neglect of primary education in the Centrally planned Indian economy, the country™s demographic profile has changed significantly, with contemporary India grudgingly hosting the world™s youngest and most short-changed electorate. Secondly, because of sustained neglect of agriculture, education, and socio-economic reform in rural India, there™s been continuous migration of impoverished peasants into the country™s overcrowded and insanitary urban habitats. And third, during the past decade the world™s most populous democracy served by 70,000 newspapers and magazines, 100 television news channels and 875 million mobile telephone connections, has experienced an unprecedented information explosion. These new socio-economic realities explain the high volatility of voter behaviour in recent elections which has resulted in dramatic reversals of electoral fortunes of the country™s numerous political parties, including AAP, which, it may be recalled, received a drubbing in General Election 2014 in which it contested 432 seats countrywide and won only four. Now that the party has clearly been forgiven by the electorate for its 49-day disastrous governance of Delhi last year, and endowed with an overwhelming mandate not only to govern Delhi state but also to put its house in order and practice new politics in step with the temper of the times, it™s important the party™s leadership doesn™t misinterpret its mandate and revert to practising populist freebies politics, which ruined the Congress party. The leadership of this fledgling party needs to be aware that in a country with a failed education system, its role is as much to educate the public as it is to govern with sincerity and transparency. The country™s youthful and ill-educated electorate needs to be tutored that the politics of vote-banks and hand-outs is a zero sum game in which instant gratification is nullified by persistent inflation. If the AAP leadership misinterprets its miraculous second mandate, the party will be rejected as decisively as the BJP, which misread its General Election 2014 mandate and paid a heavy price in the Delhi state election. Electorate™s message to BJP leadership Nine months after it stormed to power in New Delhi following the 2014 General Election on the strength of its promise to re-fire India™s stalled engines of economic growth, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads a coalition of 28 parties at the Centre, seems intent on realising the worst fears of liberal academics and the intelligentsia. Fringe elements…
