It may be tempting to view the ongoing slanging match within the Aam Aadmi Party as (AAP) the struggle for leadership in the American system of party primaries to give members a chance to decide who should lead them. But is the tussle between the Arvind Kejriwal camp on one side and the followers of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan on the other fitted into a prepared structure that allows AAP’s members to influence its future planning, it wouldn’t have been quite so messy, chaotic and ugly.The harsh reality is that it is yet another reflection of the supreme culture that has come to characterise most national and regional political parties in India to which the AAP was supposed to provide an alternative.
The vitriolic tone in charges and counter-charges between the two groups apart, the frequent occurrence of words like “internal democracy”, “transparency” and “anti-party activities substance” shows that what is happening in the country’s newest political party that has just captured power in Delhi is no different from what has happened and is happening in most other parties.
The elements of the supreme culture—often involving tussle for power based on personalities—can be witnessed in most Indian political parties including the Congress, the Shiv Sena, the Akali Dal, the Biju Janata Dal, the Telugu Desam Party, the Samajwadi Party, the YSR Congress and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam that have become dynastic parties. However, centralisation of authority also extends to non-dynastic parties like the All India United Democratic Front and the Asom Gana Parishad, the Trinamool Congress, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Bahujan Samaj Party. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left parties that occupy two ideological extremes in Indian politics are also showing signs of it of late.
In a way the multi-party system that has taken roots in India after over six decades since Independence belies former England prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s famous dictum that “in a progressive country change is constant; change is inevitable”. A clear evidence of this is that the scourge of nepotism has never left the centrestage of Indian politics and it is constant. From Abdullahs in Kashmir to Karunanidhis in Tamil Nadu, our politicians are one in perpetrating “nepotism”.
As Patrick French in his book India: A portrait rightly argues, the growing nepotism in Indian political parties is a logical offshoot of the lack of intra-party democracy. In his exhaustive analysis of dynastic politics, he has found a direct relationship between ages of the members of the 15th Lok Sabha and their links to a political family. All MPs below 30 in the Lok Sabha are from political families. Additionally, all 11 Congress MPs below 35 years are hereditary MPs. Dynasty is again at the forefront in the ticket distribution process, with senior party leaders fielding their sons, daughters and nephews.
The domain of political parties in India has undergone amazing transformation since the time the country became a democratic republic. From a time when the political scientists and commentators had worked out theories of one-party dominance or felt anxious about the conduciveness of such a party system for the democracy to blossom, we have reached a situation where too many parties stampede and jostle for space in the party domain, ushering in an era of multi-party democracy. The plural and federal character of our polity has been asserting itself in the party domain for quite sometime. Of the 50 parties that are now recognised as national and state parties, 44 have been founded after Independence.
Most of these parties have become centred around one leader, who exercises absolute control over the party. While these parties started as instruments for democratising the state and the society, they have tended to become internally less democratic. As democratic pressures have increased, party leaders found way out to win elections by resorting to huge expenditure in securing votes, use of coercion, and playing up caste and community identities. As the capacity of the state to meet these aspirations turned out to be limited and the leaders are excessively interested in perpetuating themselves in power endlessly and amass wealth by making use of their position, it became difficult for the parties to manage public affairs. Representative bodies have become arenas of confrontational politics, where rivals launch personal attacks rather than to deliberate upon policies and legislate.
One reason for the propensity of the Indian political parties to centralise authority can be the withering away of their original organisational bases. The organisational base of political parties in India often precedes their formal creation. While the BJP spun off the Jana Sangh with support from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Left was moulded by the unification of splintered communist movements in the early 20th century. These parties and their leaders are often kept in check by strong, cadre-based organisations. However, in the loss of power by the Left parties and the BJP’s inability to regain after 1994 loss showed that their organisational base was either shrinking or not expanding enough to enable them to capture power. It was the realisation that the lack of a strong leadership was a cause of this failure that forced the BJP to project Narendra Modi as the party’s prime ministerial candidate during the run-up to 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The unprecedented success of the experiment has brought about a subtle but distinct transformation within the party from “collective leadership” to a more centralised electoral machine.
It is an undeniable feature of Indian polity that parties have an incentive to centralise the organisation because of the patronage power of the state. The state is involved in everyday economic activity of most citizens—from running railways and building big industrial complexes to social sector programmes. It is the primary investor, creator and provider of most goods that citizens consume. The control over the state and its institutions helps in crystallising the support base of a politician. And once in power, the only way to expand his support base is to disburse the state patronage to his supporters and keep off those within the party who could challenge him from wielding levers of power. The recent fracas in AAP reflects this reality.