If the most savvy political Delhiites couldn’t predict the Aam Admi Party’s spectacular success, as a Chennaiite, I must admit I was miles away from getting the voters’ mood right.

So on a recent visit to Delhi, I strived to improve my political gyanvis-à-vis Arvind Kejriwal’s stunning baptism in Indian politics. In a conversation with a group of upper middle-class youngsters — some of them legal professionals — it was an eye-opener to find that all of them exercised their franchise, and in favour of AAP. “In my close circle of family and friends, I do not know a single person who did not vote for the AAP,” said one of them.

Another, whose parents are doctors, had an interesting story to relate. His father is a staunch Congressman and his mother an avid BJP supporter and both have always voted along these lines. But this time they “decided to give AAP a chance as neither party had anything new or fresh to offer, but the AAP held out some hope.”

Well begun… Well, nothing succeeds like success, and well begun is half done. The manner in which Kejriwal was sworn in, his travelling to the Ramlila grounds by metro and his resounding reiteration to the massive crowd at the swearing in ceremony — that along with him every aam admi had been sworn in — has sent shivers down the spines of both the Congress and the BJP leaders.

While Congress leaders in Delhi are whining about how the support can’t be “unconditional”, the BJP leadership is confused on how to handle obstacles that might spoil its party in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. Its netas must be scowling at Kejriwal raising full-throated slogans such as Bharat mata ki jai and Vande mataram , hitherto considered a patent of Modi & Co.

After Rahul Gandhi, senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar said on Monday there were lessons to learn from the AAP’s “youthfulness and enthusiasm, the way they devised their poll strategy as well as how efficiently they managed their election campaign”.

But Kejriwal’s success has sent both the parties’ think-tanks to the war room to rejig their 2014 poll strategies. While after this severe rap on its wrist in Delhi, the Congress is suitably subdued and contrite — at least it pretends to be so — the BJP, the single largest party in Delhi, is agonising over whether to go all out and attack the AAP now or wait patiently for it to mess up on some count or the other.

But its leader with the foot-in-mouth disease, Nitin Gadkari, who was shown his place in the party by its strongman Narendra Modi, has once again goofed up by charging that the AAP has struck a “deal” with the Congress.

Challenges abound But while political parties and their hardcore supporters are waiting for the AAP to falter and fail, majority of Indians want Kejriwal to succeed because, in the past, many IITians like him, and other professionals who fought elections in an effort to clean up the system, have bitten the dust.

But winning was the easy part; delivering on promises will be much tougher, if not impossible. For one thing, Delhi’s babus are bound to run circles around the novice chief minister and his young, inexperienced team. It was, perhaps, to match the arrogance of IAS officers and others that politicians like a Lalu Yadav in Bihar or the Chautalas of Haryana and their country cousins elsewhere, were born.

Right now, what Kejriwal is talking about — 700 litres of water free every day, a 50 per cent cut in electricity bills — falls under the sops and subsidy category. In principle, they don’t seem much different from the one or two rupees a kg rice and other freebees pioneered by southern regional leaders such as MGR and NTR. At the end of the day, somebody will have to foot the bill if the Delhi exchequer is to be saved from spiralling debts. The counter to this could be huge cuts in expenditure and, even more important, plugging the siphoning of government funds to pay for these promises. And then what about the residents who don’t have any water connection to talk about… estimated at 25-30 per cent?

The big ticket corruption might be easier to plug than the bribe-at-every-level culture that has seeped so deeply into our system. Forget the top notch babus , it remains to be seen how the hawaldar, the tahsildar and the huge army of government clerks, used to the good life through speed money, react to Kejriwal’s jhadu -sweeping. Just as a corporate manager can be only as good as the weakest link in his team, AAP’s governance in Delhi can be destroyed by the lowliest of sarkari karmacharis .

Good will and patience If he has to make even a small difference, Kejriwal needs the collective goodwill, prayers, support and, above all, patience of Indians tortured and tormented by years of misgovernance, massive corruption and arrogance of power-hungry netas . It will be unfair to expect him to wipe away all the ills ingrained in our system at one go. Baby steps are what he and his team need to take, and that too gingerly, as they carefully wade through the minefield of politics.

Meanwhile, the AAP’s success has rekindled hope among millions of Indians trapped in the depths of inequity… poverty, illiteracy, unemployment… that all is not lost. Only an honest and effective administration that is not greedy to grab power and does not divide people on the basis of religion, caste, class, language and region, can steer the country out of the present morass of gloom and doom.

While this will be an uphill task, the AAP’s success is already creating tremors in neighbouring states. AAP leader and psephologist Yogendra Yadav is already mustering support in Haryana. And apparently even in the Kashmir Valley, the party’s success has revived hope among the disenchanted, educated youth of Kashmir. They now feel it is possible to sidestep the political parties in Jammu and Kashmir as well as the separatists who are already canvassing to boycott the 2014 elections, follow a new direction and give birth to a new movement. Shaayad phir subah hogi …

>rasheeda.bhagat@thehindu.co.in

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