If there is one block of votes the Congress should really be worried about now in the run-up to the assembly elections in Delhi and next year’s general election, it is the urban vote. If Delhi’s pollsters and political pundits are to be believed, after two back-to-back victories, the Congress and its United Progressive Alliance (UPA) seem to be losing their grip over urban voters across the country — and Delhi is a good indicator.

Along with other factors, the shift of the urban vote from the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to the Congress-led UPA in the 2004 election marked the end of the Vajpayee government. The numbers were stark. The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance that won five out of six Mumbai seats in 1999, saw the verdict being reversed in 2004, when only Shiv Sena’s Mohan Rawale won from Mumbai South-Central. And in 2009, the Congress-NCP alliance swept all the Mumbai urban seats. Similarly, the BJP that had won all the seven Delhi seats in 1999, managed to retain just one measly seat in 2004 and lost that too in 2009.

Are Delhi and Mumbai the weathercocks of Indian politics? Not necessarily. But being the two bipolar electoral battlegrounds for the NDA and the UPA, with a cosmopolitan mix of migrant voters from across the country, they offer the best examples of the urban shift of votes from one formation to the other. The NDA is virtually nonexistent in Kolkata and Chennai where regional parties dominate. Hence, it is always better to look at Delhi and Mumbai to explain the urban vote shift. After all, these two cities are microcosms of the Great Indian Melting Pot, their people often swayed by rhetoric wrapped in idealism.

Patriotism was the prime campaign tool devised by the BJP leader Pramod Mahajan in 1999 to attack the Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s haste in pulling the Vajpayee government down. The Kargil war was just over and the coffins of martyrs were still fresh in the minds of those who voted for an intangible idea — national pride. The “Hindu bomb” experiment at Pokhran the previous year went down well with the men and women of the metros where the mood was one of militant nationalism.

But five years later, the same metro voter supported Sonia Gandhi’s attack on the Vajpayee government over the Kargil coffin scam, corruption in privatisation of blue-chip public sector companies, and the swing was there for all to see. This was despite the NDA beginning to build its ambitious golden quadrilateral, connecting all the metros, and unleashing the “India Shining” ad blitzkrieg. The first nationally televised riots of Gujarat were just two years old and the mood was sombre, worrisome and conciliatory. However, in the 2009 elections, the Rs 20,000-crore payout by the Sixth Pay Commission and an all-round sense of well-being which was yet to be marred by corruption charges, probably explain the Congress’ sweep of all the metro seats in Delhi and Mumbai (with one seat for its ally, the NCP).

ANTI-CORRUPTION WAVE

Less than two years after the BJP’s drubbing, a new kind of mobilisation took place in the metros, particularly Delhi and Mumbai. Corruption, the all-pervasive phenomenon in Indian polity, became a “civil society” issue and struck a chord yet again, primarily because of the humiliation experienced by the Delhiite over the Commonwealth Games fiasco.

The metro man and woman, fed on fantasies of first world citizenship, were once more exposed to the rulers of real India: slothful, sleazy and shameless. The rapes of women on city streets and the spiralling cost of living touched every individual.

The vocal rich and the silent poor who always vote have both been deeply scarred by insecurity and inflation. Each day, the nations auditor would come out with shocking stories of plunder by the rulers. The spectrum and coal scandals surpassed everything else in terms of notional losses reported hitherto. The mood swung yet again.

Is there another “reverse sweep” in the making in 2013? Delhi’s pollsters and pundits alike feel that Sheila Dikshit’s 15-year reign will come to an end. And the game-changers have been the anti-corruption campaigners, Kisan Baburao Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal.

The army truck driver-IIT graduate combination has energised not just the fickle middle classes, but also the lower classes that aspire to acquire the trappings of the middle classes. Now, software engineers from Houston and shopkeepers from Hapur want to change the way Indian politics is run.

Though Kejriwal is taking baby steps and his party is contesting only the Delhi assembly elections, the wannabe Hercules has already got the broom as his election symbol and has set his eyes firmly on cleaning up the Raisina Hill stables.

But the big debate in Delhi is about Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Is it just a vote katwa (a cow-belt term for a candidate who contests only to spoil another’s chances) party, or is he the broom-wielding messiah? The fact remains that the anti-corruption movement that Hazare led from early 2011 has swung public opinion against the Congress-led government at the Centre.

Last week, Kejriwal told Business Line that his internal surveys had shown a surge in his share of potential votes in Delhi: the first poll done about 8 to 10 months ago gave his party just 14 per cent of the vote, with the Congress and BJP tied at 35 per cent each.

But the latest survey conducted in the last few weeks makes him or his candidate a contender for the chief minister’s seat with 27 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Congress by 1 per cent and second only to the BJP which may poll 31 per cent. This may well be Kejriwal’s dream numbers drummed up by his own surveyors.

No advantage

According to the ABP-AC Nielsen survey, the Hazare-Kejriwal combine has only helped swing votes and seats in the BJP’s favour without adding much to the AAP itself. The survey predicts 32 seats for the BJP, 27 for the Congress and just 8 for the AAP in a house of 70. The November polls, touted as the first genuine triangular contest in the capital, could well end up as an attempt to expose the government and dethrone the ruling party.

There is no clearly articulated ideological course for the AAP just yet. Although he claims he will seek solutions simultaneously from capitalism and socialism, he insists he doesn’t owe his politics to the Kautiliya of the Indian right, RSS stalwart K. N. Govindacharya. The February 27, 2011, meeting at Ramlila Maidan, the launch-pad for the “anti-corruption movement”where he shared a platform with Govindacharya, Subramaniam Swamy, Ram Jethmalani and the controversial Baba Ramdev, was just a “one-off event” says Kejriwal.

But he admits that his campaign and presence will benefit the BJP if he doesn't contest. So, Kejriwal wants to wait for the Delhi results before jumping into Mumbai waters. Meanwhile, more IITians, engineers, shopkeepers and slum dwellers flock his meetings, hoping things will change in urban India.

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