One of the most magical moments of this election, the moment when people saw politics once again as an act of faith and hope, was the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party. The story of AAP is not just its story, it is the story of these people reinventing politics and themselves
I want to begin with a story. Last night, I received a phone call from a
friend of mine. She told me that she was on a truck heading for the
Kolar Gold Fields to campaign for a friend who had joined the Aam Aadmi
Party (AAP). She hinted that AAP there spoke a different dialect from
AAP in Bangalore or Varanasi.
AAP, she claimed, was a collection of dialects, a set of murmurings,
whispers and silences. She did not use the word voice claiming that
social scientists had wrecked the meaning of voice, divorcing it from
speech. AAP, she claimed could be an amplifier of murmurings, little
fragments of protest scattered across the landscape. Her candidate,
Ramiah would not get the attention that a Nandan Nilekani commands but
it is precisely why the former is important. AAP, she and others claim,
is not a taproot like the Congress, or the CPI(M) or the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP); it is like a rhizome ready to spring anywhere and
connect to anything. In an organisational sense, AAP is not a
hierarchical party, with a centralised voice. In recreating the idea of
empowerment as an enabling exercise, AAP has to continue to be
inventive. Murmurings were her label for the new politics. She referred
to it as the politics of humility because it captures the power of small
protests. Empowerment, she said, begins with the marginal, or the
forgotten; it has to entice the music of politics out of the silences of
our time. Politics takes storytelling to realms beyond the formal by
translating the “murmurings” of our age, the still inarticulate protests
of our time. The beauty of AAP is that it is full of surprises. It
realises that the conscience of politics will come from these people.
I realise my friend was right. One of the most magical moments of this
election was the rise of AAP. I am not referring to Mr. Kejriwal only
but the AAP effect, that magical moment when people saw politics once
again as an act of faith and hope. Thousands of people including
students, retired professionals, journalists and housewives saw in AAP a
new phenomenon which renewed their faith in citizenship. In fact, the
story of AAP is not just AAP’s story, it is the story of these people
reinventing politics and themselves. AAP may not win many seats but it
is an exemplary exercise. It will continue to reinvent itself long after
this election is over. It is a chrysalis for the future.
This essay asks itself what the directions in which an AAP can create new worlds and possibilities could be.
Incompleteness of citizenship
In reworking politics, it questions old classifications. It realises
that citizenship is not a fully hatched word like a large ostrich egg.
It is a growth, a promise, a hypothesis which has to be tested.
Citizenship is not a guarantee of entitlements but a promissory note.
What AAP has to emphasise is the incompleteness of citizenship. It is
the recognition of the fact that the refugee, the scavenger, the nomad,
the subsistence farmer, the pastoral group, the fisherman and others in
the informal economy constitute over 70 per cent of India and lack
rights or even a temporary claim to citizenship. To reinvent democracy,
AAP has to retain the mnemonic of the informal. In challenging the
temporariness of citizenship, AAP creates a durability, a competence
around the fragility of the informal threatened by clerks, police and
goons. Empowerment is a way of going beyond these obstacles to rework
cities, offices, hospitals, villages and technologies.
Learning from Gandhi
The history of AAP begins with the politics of body because the body is
the real site for politics. In claiming the body as a vehicle of being
and protest, students discover the violence of the state and
vulnerability of their bodies facing water cannons, stones or lathi
charges. The body gives politics an immediacy which fine-tunes protest.
It is a site for struggle. The body also prevents politics from straying
into the abstractions of ideology or policy. It is a statement of
presence, of sensing politics and suffering as part of a sensorium of
sounds, smells, touch, taste and memory. In this world, poverty can
never be a statistic, but a way of experiencing the world. Poverty can
never be reduced to Rs.32 a day when it is lived through the body. The
body keeps politics concrete, tangible, and personal and creates a space
for ethics. This much the AAP generation learnt from Gandhiji.
An experiment in politics as truth begins with the body. It is the
tuning fork for understanding poverty, well-being, torture,
communication and time. It gives politics the depth of everydayness as
it understands pain, joy or stigma. When Mr. Kejriwal was stoned and
slapped repeatedly he realised that there were other messages beyond
coercion. When he communes with Gandhiji at Rajghat, he articulates a
new strength and vulnerability that is profound by moving. Language then
becomes critical because language is not mere text but speech and
dialect. AAP realises the world of manifesto as text comes alive in
speech, in orality, in gossip and rumour as the nukhad and mohalla embrace
and debate an idea. Because language is playful, politics can be
playful, allowing for humour, ambiguity, translation. In being playful
with language, AAP can liberate politics from its pomposity, its
ideological heaviness, and the hypocritical impasses it has got into.
AAP has to return magic to old tired words like secularism, development,
security, participation, and nation state. It is more open to mistakes
as it is constantly rereads its own politics. It creates a new language
of error which liberates it from pomposity. What makes AAP refreshing is
the ease with which it owns up to mistakes. AAP has a more relaxed view
of its role in history so it can see the comedy of politics.
An experimental party
The politics of AAP cannot be an act of storytelling in linear time as
history and most U.N. and World Bank reports are. The obscenity of
development is that it has no sense of defeated or obsolescent time. One
needs a plurality of time to dream of diversity. Tribal time, body
time, peasant time, displaced time of refugee, the obsolescent time of a
craftsmen need space, voice and articulation. They cannot be confined
to indifference. The nation state seeks to create a uniformity of time
while AAP politics should seek to pluralise time. One cannot think of an
ethics of memory or an ethics of sustainability without it. In this
sense, AAP is creating a link between the ethical and the political,
pointing out to the lost times in each word. History eats up myth,
development destroys nomadic time, and innovation hides obsolescence.
Forces like globalisation only understand speed and instantaneity. AAP,
by creating a commons of time, allows for memories, silence, new tales
of suffering, and new kinds of ecology. AAP in that sense is not a
specific timetable but an act of storytelling, which unfolds terms of
its own rhythms. This variety of time allows for little experiments all
over India. Instead of a million mutinies, AAP becomes the politics of a
million inventions, many of which are life sustaining. Democracy
without that diversity of experiments in technology and livelihood is
doomed.
Finally, AAP is experimental. As a result, it is not inflexibly tied to
any ideology or any charter of the future. AAP wants politics to be full
of surprises. In that sense, it is not a planned rocket but a wager. It
does not need the mass leader in a fascist sense but insists that
citizenship, when it is no longer passive, is a form of leadership. It
takes problem-solving in a modest way realising that solutions to work
are contextual and local. AAP requires a million exemplars to sustain
itself as a paradigm. In doing this, it breaks the fossilisation of
democracy as a fetish of rights, elections and governance. It is the
democratisation of democracy that makes AAP the party of the future. I
think this is why we have to look at AAP differently, expect more but
expect the less predictable from it. This is what makes it the party of
the future and a party with a future.
The Hindu
April 16, 2014
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