Why the AAP Lost Delhi: Corruption, Governance, and Political Strategy

In his 2018 book Republic of Caste, Anand Teltumbde described the Aam Aadmi Party as “A Political App for the Neoliberal era”. It was a telling analogy. Like a mobile application, the AAP’s political package seemed to offer a range of functionalities to its citizen consumers. The proposed functionalities centred on improving the quality of public goods, like health and education, along with subsidised provision of welfare services like electricity, drinking water, and transportation. 

In the essay, Teltumbde had issued a pointed warning to the AAP’s “anti-politics” political enterprise: “The biggest challenge before a fledgling entity is to scale up or be gobbled by the bigger sharks. Remember what Microsoft did to Netscape or what Amazon is doing to Flipkart.” That is pretty much what happened in the recent Delhi election. Not only did the AAP’s efforts to scale up prove less than successful (barring the triumph in Punjab), but the party also failed to upgrade its package (offer new functions) even as competitors copied its core offerings. After a little over a decade in power, the electorate of Delhi uninstalled the AAP from its seat of power, and installed its monopolist rival, the BJP, which was aided by its enormous advantages in terms of material resources and institutional power. 

Although the descriptor of “post-ideological” politics is customarily attached to the AAP, the party is hardly alone in its “apolitical” or “technocratic” approach to public policy. The post 1990s phase of Indian politics has been marked by a general trend of the depoliticisation of the domain of the political economy. By political economy, we basically mean questions of how political power structures economic relationships, and how that relates to the distribution of income and wealth. As far as these distributional issues are concerned, the AAP’s “apolitical” stance has been in lockstep with the times. The only difference is its public disavowal of the planks of social justice and secularism, to which other parties at least offer the thin gruel of rhetorical commitment.

The point is worth mentioning because the “post-ideological” labelling of the AAP sometimes elides the wider context in which the party emerged. In other words, the party is not a “unique” or “special” political organisation, contrary to the portrayal of both its supporters and critics. In fact, one can make a good case that Arvind Kejriwal’s rule was less technocratic than the preceding 15-year reign of the Sheila Dikshit-led Congress’, where bureaucrats held the reigns of governance with little popular participation (except for expanding the power of resident welfare associations within their elite enclaves). The AAP government, in this sense, for all its muffler-clad populist garb of “aam aadmi” (common man), represented much more of a continuation rather than a break.

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In the 2015 election, the first wave election for the AAP, a Lokniti-CSDS survey finding highlighted why the electorate had junked the Congress for the newbie party. On a question asking respondents what they thought of the Dikshit government’s record on development and corruption, 69 per cent ticked the box: “Delhi developed during Shiela Dixit’s tenure but corruption also increased.” It was this perception of widespread corruption that the AAP (and its precursor India Against Corruption) had skilfully deployed as a plank to oust the Congress.

And ironically, the AAP itself has now been pushed out partly on the perception of corruption, fed this time by the BJP political machine, with some help from the Congress. Again, a Lokniti CSDS finding bears this out: while six out of 10 Delhi respondents claimed satisfaction with the work of the State government, nearly two-thirds also rated the AAP as “somewhat” or “highly corrupt”. In both cases, therefore, the anti-incumbency sentiment which ousted the respective Congress and AAP regimes reflected not so much anger against non-performance as much as a sense of weary disillusionment. A popular disenchantment with politics, thus marking both the spectacular birth and the quiet demise of the AAP rule in Delhi.

To adequately analyse the Delhi verdict, therefore, it is important to first get a handle on what constitutes this popular disillusionment.

Party building without grassroots

As political anthropologists have long argued, the catch-all term “corruption”, as used in political discourse, does not necessarily indicate a popular resentment towards bribery or illicit money-making. The saliency of corruption lies in its communication of “distance” between the government and the governed, a resentment towards exclusion or alienation from structures of power. One might quote from Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (2012) by Akhil Gupta, one of the foremost scholars studying the sociological constitution of the term “corruption”: “When villagers complained about the corruption of state officials, therefore, they were not just voicing their exclusion from government services because these were costly, although that was no small factor. More important, they were expressing frustration because they lacked the cultural capital required to negotiate deftly for those services.”

In this light, the perception of corruption is not an indictment of the moral vacuity of the Congress or the AAP leadership. It is an indictment of their model of party building and their framework of political imagination. Let us take each aspect in turn.

The organisational model of both the Congress and the AAP—and this can be extrapolated to most political parties—has three salient features. One, the absence of any grassroot structure comprised of political activists interfacing with the population. Two, the almost exclusive role of the organisation as a vehicle for co-ordinating election campaigns (lately, with the help of professional management). Third, the absence of structures facilitating upward mobility within the organisation, from where the party can draw its representatives (the latter are instead mostly drawn from local elites near the election cycle). To sum up, in the life of an ordinary citizen, the party is an apparition which springs up like an exotic seasonal fruit during the campaign period, unlike the case with the BJP, and particularly its affiliate organisations.

This anaemic model of party building stems from a chronic failure of political imagination. In the limited political imagination of the Congress or the AAP, there is hardly any role of popular or mass mobilisation. The term “mobilisation”, let us remember, has a specific meaning in politics (different from busing in crowds for rallies). It comes from a certain European Left tradition (think Antonio Gramsci) which saw the practice of politics as akin to long-term warfare.

In this vision, popular constituencies and political activists had to be “educated” and “prepared” for leadership, within perpetual sociopolitical movements, according to a given roadmap for attaining political change. Ideology is not meant to be a set of proclamations drafted onto a speech or an election manifesto, but the principles of the party as practiced in the terrain of everyday grassroot politics. In India, too, these concepts carried considerable purchase, at least in the first few decades after Independence. This was especially the case for socialist, communist, and backward caste parties which brought a large section of small farmers and rural workers into the sphere of active political participation.

To be fair, energetic bands of AAP volunteers did initially attempt to perform this role of empowering people through political education. Yet, those efforts were soon hobbled by a certain middle-class reformism at the core of the party’s political imagination, with its attendant caste and class biases. As the political sociologist Srirupa Roy recounted from her fieldwork on AAP campaigns in her book The Political Outsider: “But in this slum location,” the prototypical aam aadmi, as per AAP volunteers, was not just the victim of a corrupt establishment: “He was a victim of his own ignorance, fear and ‘gandagi ki aadat’ (dirty habits)”. In other words, political education here had less to do with empowering the slum dweller on how to procedurally avail, or politically struggle for, his legal rights and entitlements, and more of an advocacy for moral reform, in the Gandhian socialist mould of yesteryears.

Reviving urban mobilisation

For a long time now, the socio-economic condition of the urban precariat has been ripe for an urban popular mobilisation, on pressing livelihood issues, analogous to the rural peasant mobilisations of the early post-Independence decades. We do not need to talk about hypotheticals. The left-wing party-movements which took power amidst the “pink tide” of Latin America at the turn of this century have been driven largely by coalitions led by urban working classes.

Along with the indigenous communities, it has been these “new working classes”, drawn from the bulging informal sector, which have provided the motor engine for dominant left-wing party coalitions: the Brazilian Workers’ Party of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Mexican Morena of President Claudia Sheinbaum, as well as the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism) party of Bolivia and the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) of Uruguay.

Of course, none of this happened automatically. In Neoliberal Hegemony and the Pink Tide in Latin America: Breaking Up with TINA, the political scientist Tom Chodor examined how these party-led political movements brought together “marginalized and excluded subjectivities” to forge successful “anti-elite” coalitions. Chodor argued that this coalition strategy followed “Gramsci’s insistence that the construction of a radical collective will is ‘an active and reciprocal’ educative relationship… illuminating the intersecting dimensions of class, race, and gender exploitation”.

Another book on Brazil’s urban governance reforms under the Workers’ Party, Bootstrapping Democracy, detailed how the Participatory Budgeting mechanism transformed the whole architecture of local governance in a number of cities. The “Porto Alegre Model” (named after the city where it was first introduced) involves citizens directly deciding on how the municipal budget is allocated, based on open meetings with structured discussions, thus ensuring a very broad degree of participation in governance. This wildly popular governance innovation has since become a keystone of the “popular empowerment” legacy of the Workers’ Party.

It is worth quoting the authors Gianpaolo Baiocchi et al. as they describe the conditions of urban Brazil which created the bottom-up demand for reform: “Driven by an agrarian transition that has not only been exceptionally rapid but also dominated by capital intensive and labour-displacing modernization, rural-urban migration has exploded and Brazil’s cities have had to accommodate one hundred million new residents since 1960. This has produced a rapid and largely unregulated growth of precarious peripheral areas, exacerbating what were already pronounced problems of urban poverty and informality.” With very few changes, this description can almost exactly fit present-day Delhi.

The city also exuded the same bottom-up demand for participative democracy, manifested in the newborn AAP’s unprecedented triumph in 2013, and then the sweep of 2015. In fact, after its 2015 victory, the AAP also announced, with much fanfare, its decision to experiment with the model of participatory budgeting. The party promised to realize its goal of Swaraj through such an exercise of budget deliberation via popular assemblies. A pilot programme was announced, which ran fitfully for one year, after which the whole thing was scrapped and forgotten.

As one study put it: “Participation in neighbourhood assemblies was much weaker than expected (the average number of participants was around 80 persons, out of about 4,500 local residents); and the selection of priority work was not prepared through prior discussions.” In other words, it turned out to be a case of deft political marketing minus the political commitment towards actual popular participation. The AAP’s politics makes much of ameliorating the depredations of informality and illegality which mar the lives of most of Delhi’s citizenry, without ever calling into question the preservation of these state-mandated boundaries, which only serve to keep the marginalised in their place, as meek dependents to their political patrons.

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What about the Congress party and its political imagination? The party returned with zero seats, for the third straight time, after having ruled the Union Territory for three consecutive terms. This was following from its extraordinarily damaging losses of Maharashtra and Haryana. In The New Experts (2024), the political scientist Anuradha Sajjanhar quotes Jairam Ramesh (JR), a senior Congress strategist, as he confides to her: “We’re in a post-ideology world.”

“Researcher [Anuradha Sajjanhar]: What do you mean by that [post-ideology world]?

“JR: Where ideologies do not drive political parties… That era is over. Ideology drove Thatcher. Ideology drove Reagan. After that, finished. Ideology drove the Labour Party. Ideology drove Nehru. Indira Gandhi was not an ideologue… people are less ideological today. Ideology doesn’t drive discourse, the time that used to happen in the 40s and 50s… We keep using the phrase ‘party ideology’, but I don’t see ourselves [that way]. I see us having a dominant social ideology, but I don’t see us having a dominant economic ideology. Our economic ideology is a little more pragmatic, you know.”

If there is anything more egregious than the regressive middle-class reformism of the AAP party managers, it is their Congress counterparts’ ignorant Anglophone elitism (in 2025!). The politics of cash handouts—the “fast fashion” equivalent of the concept of welfare politics—has now approached its point of exhaustion. It is the persistent lack of political will and political imagination weighing down these two parties which has led to the inevitable triumph of the BJP’s Hindu nationalism in Delhi. The people of this country, at least its marginalised sections and religious minorities, deserve better.

Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi.