THE UN World Urbanization Prospects report informs us that Delhi is now the second most populous city in the world. Its 25 million inhabitants place it behind Tokyo with 38 million, but ahead of Shanghai with 23 million. Mumbai, Sao Paolo, and Mexico City bring up the rear with 21 million each. Official Indian statistics, however, place the population of Delhi at just under 18 million, with an electorate of 11.9 million. The discrepancy notwithstanding, these are serious numbers that should make for serious democratic politics.

Let us take a quick look at just two other statistics. First, the Economic Survey of Delhi 2012-13 shows that approximately 85% of this population works in the unorganized sector, with the rate of growth of organized sector employment being a measly 0.2%. The 2011 Census supplements this with the information that 50% of the population lives in one or two-room homes, with 75% of Delhi households having over four members each. Other census indicators, such as sanitation and drinking water, reveal that this population leads lives that should leave any state shamefaced. Second, Delhi is the second highest recipient of foreign direct investment after Mumbai, and has received more FDI than Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh. The distribution, or rather concentration, of wealth and economic opportunity that we may infer by placing these two factoids side by side is indicative of the marginality of the majority of denizens of this city.

The convergence between social and spatial marginality is presumed to be near perfect in rural communities whose economy and geography are structured by caste, as the unchanging sequestration of Dalit hamlets outside the village makes clear. There is, however, some expectation that the two may not quite converge in cities where the complexity of the worlds of life and work and the anonymity of public spaces produce unpredictable intersections, as Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger so disturbingly portrayed, between people who live in completely different worlds even as they inhabit the same space.

Cartographic representations of Delhi deny us the satisfaction of depicting the kind of neat overlap between social and spatial marginality that has been remarked in Sao Paolo by James Holston¹ or in Johannesburg by Patrick Heller.² Here in Delhi, spatially defined enclaves of social marginalization are found both on the periphery of the city, but also frequently nested within, or in close proximity to, the affluent neighbourhoods at its core.

 

As such, the periphery in Delhi is only partially physical. The multiple layered marginalities of the city signify an interweaving of periphery and centre. At significant moments for state symbolism, of course, attempts are made to contain this messy intermingling by forcing a greater convergence between socially and spatially marginal populations. The sprucing up of the capital city in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games was one such event when a determined administrative effort was made to clear the streets of beggars and hawkers, as also to demolish slums and evict the people who lived in them.³ The relationship of social exclusion to spatial exclusion is thus tentative and contingent.

These complicated geographies of citizenship do not make for an easy understanding of the politics of the city, or even of election results. Delhi has had an elected government only since 1993, following its recognition as a state. The assumption that Delhi’s electorate has, since 2004, moved from caste-based to class-based voting⁴ may not account for the fact that caste was probably never an infallible predictor of Delhi’s election results. In a city whose residents are largely migrants, class could not but be the most salient cleavage.

New techniques like GIS (Geographical Information Systems) have begun to explain electoral outcomes in ways more compelling than opinion surveys and exit polls. Srinivasan Ramani’s analysis of the election result of the Delhi Legislative Assembly in December 2013 evidences the fact that constituencies with the highest concentration of jhuggi clusters voted overwhelmingly for the Aam Aadmi Party.⁵ In these areas, he argued, the appeal of the AAP was not so much one of lowering the cost of public services, but the promise of reliable provision – water once a day instead of twice a week – that would reduce their dependence on the local pradhan, mostly a caste patriarch who is typically cultivated by the major parties and controls everything from ration cards and water supply to voting decisions. It was the AAP’s promise of cutting out the slumlord as gatekeeper – which it succeeded in doing during its brief term in office – that won it the support of the working poor.

 

In the run-up to the assembly election, however, the Aam Aadmi Party was widely believed to enjoy the support not only of the working poor but also of a broader cross section of the electorate, including and especially the middle class, whose anger against a corrupt government made it receptive to the appeal of the anti-corruption movement converted into a political party. While we do not yet have a similar interpretation of voting patterns in the Lok Sabha election in May 2014, more conventional forms of election analysis suggest that it was the middle class that deserted the AAP, disillusioned by the theatrics of its leaders and their eagerness to bolt after just seven weeks in office.

The AAP had already experienced a significant identity shift from movement to party, accomplished in the course of a mere twelve months. Its lineage in the India Against Corruption movement, notwithstanding the bitter break, gave the AAP leadership some political credibility with a wide cross section of the people. If it is indeed the case that a segment of its middle class supporters have forsaken the party, it could currently be experiencing a second shift in identity – a shift from being a cross-class coalition to a party of the urban poor and less so now of the middle class.

 

In the days of its early triumph, the AAP seemed to have a broad coalition of social classes supporting it, and the absence of a coherent ideological programme was initially advantageous, as it made it possible for the party to be invested with the hopes and aspirations of very diverse social constituencies. Each of its myriad supporters imagined the AAP in their own way, imbuing it with their personal political wish list. It was not long before it became clear that these wish lists could, and indeed did, pull the party in different and even conflicting directions. If the first shift, from movement to party, was a deliberate act of political will, the second shift was wholly unintended, a loss of its own making that the party is now trying to recover from.

In either case, both in its December 2013 as well as in its May 2014 avatar, the AAP represented a new phenomenon. Unlike the mainstream parties, it was a solo act – no dynastic baggage, on the whole modest resources and no bankrolling by big industrial houses. But looking beyond these relatively superficial differences with the mainstream parties, there were other ways in which the AAP seemed to be rewriting the script of Indian democracy.

Pre-eminent among its claims was that of democratizing democracy. In the past two decades, the democratic deficit has been conceptualized largely in terms of the under-representation of the backward castes. The political mobilization of the ‘social justice parties’ led to an expansion in the numbers of backward castes in parliament and the state legislatures, a trend that was celebrated by scholars as symbolic of the deepening of Indian democracy.⁶ The politics of the AAP signalled a break with this older frame in which more democracy meant representative institutions that were more reflective of the diversity of Indian society.

 

The AAP reconceptualized the deficit of Indian democracy in two ways. First, instead of focusing on which group is represented in what proportion, it foregrounded representativeness in terms of the interests, preferences and aspirations of citizens, and so moved from one benchmark of when democracy is deepened to another radically different one, and from a representative claim based on ‘who’ is represented to one based on ‘what’ is represented. The urban context of its birth made this an unselfconscious and natural break. Wittingly or unwittingly, the AAP asked voters to heed a new collectivity – not a group defined ascriptively, but a group of people which has in common nothing more than its shared citizenship and a shared preference for a reasonable provision of basic public goods in a manner that is not haunted by leakages and corruption, and governance that is accountable and transparent.

 

This was a cry for a public order in which citizens can have minimal entitlements and enjoy access to daily necessities like food and water, health and education, electricity and transport; where they do not have to pay bribes for ration cards and driving licenses; and where they enjoy at least minimal security. It is another matter that the AAP was unable to effectively deliver on any or all of these in its limited jurisdiction and time frame. But the very articulation of these needs and preferences of citizens in this particular way signalled the possibilities of a different type of claim making and potentially also citizen-making.

The AAP’s electoral success in December 2013 and its critique of the limitations of representative democracy seemed to presage the coming of participatory democracy.⁷ It was certainly an assertion of citizens’ disenchantment with the elite nature of Indian democracy, the corruption and cronyism, and the sense that the driving force of this democracy is not public purpose but private gain. This disenchantment was expressed in a view of unresponsive governance as a distortion of democracy and a plea for forms which are more direct and transparent, and in which citizens have a say more frequently and more effectively.

Following from this, the second deficit that the AAP pointed to was that of the institutional capacity to properly and effectively represent these interests and preferences of citizens. It suggested that the existing institutions of representative democracy could not accomplish this and pointed to the need for other types of ongoing civic engagement in arenas beyond formal politics and alternative accountability mechanisms to facilitate it. It showed that civil society could, however fleetingly, burst out of the institutional confines within which it was trapped, transgressing the boundaries set by conventional definitions of democracy that ask citizens to participate once in five years and expect passive acquiescence the rest of the time. However, neither in campaign nor in office could it point to practical alternatives that spoke to these institutional concerns. Its promise of direct democracy through swaraj while representing a trenchant critique of existing modes of participation failed to go beyond signalling of intent. And the government belied its own promise by sacrificing the Jan Lokpal Bill through a petulant and eventually suicidal response to a procedural issue.

 

The intractability of how to make the political process more robustly reflect the needs and aspirations of ‘the people’ was not surprising given the amorphousness of its favourite category, ‘the people’. The AAP relied unduly (and eponymously) on a category that defies concretization. Who are the people? Representative democracy may be deeply flawed, but at least, through structured electoral processes, it makes possible some approximation of the popular will. It is an irresolvable part of the democratic paradox that the people are almost never, and on every issue, of one mind. When they speak in conflicting or multiple voices, how should these differences be arbitrated and by whom? The AAP was unable to offer a plausible solution to the problem of how to translate the people’s will on any given subject, and resorted to the gimmickry of SMS referenda to decide important issues like whether it should form a government and again whether it should quit the government. The mandate (admittedly less than a majority) already given by the voters was thus to be further adjudged by this fuzzy entity called ‘the people’ before being accepted or not.

 

Unsurprisingly, the optimism that undeniably attended the AAP’s assumption of office did not last, not even as long as its forty-nine days in government. A series of ill-timed misadventures led to a rather rapid dissipation of goodwill for the party. Early signs of the disillusionment became evident when the law minister of the Delhi government decided to pursue the path of vigilante justice by involving himself in a televised midnight raid in Khirki Extension, ostensibly to expose a drug and prostitution racket. This was followed by the spectacle of the chief minister sitting on dharna by day and sleeping next to his little car on the street by night. The simplicity of this cameo may have endeared him to a few, but the support of the party’s middle class constituency unmistakably dwindled, and was substantially withdrawn by the time the state government put in its papers. In the run-up to the parliamentary election, the tendency to get into street fights and the vandalizing of opposition party offices only made the AAP appear immature and institutionally untrustworthy. To a middle class fastidious about norms in public life, it seemed to signal another form of political plebeianization.

Not only had the tension between the party’s middle class and lower class constituents become apparent before the election, there were also signs of tension within the party, between its elite leadership and subaltern rank-and-file. As tickets to contest the election were given to journalists, lawyers, social activists, intellectuals, IT professionals and bankers, its more humble workers (and even one of its leading legal activists) expressed their frustration, sometimes erupting in minor violence.

 

This elite-subaltern tension, to use shorthand, could be the progenitor of a future political space, whether or not it is the AAP that gives it expression and leadership. Knowingly or otherwise, the AAP has introduced a possibly enduring polarization into ways of thinking about governance. On the one hand, there is a model of governance applauded by the elites which provides the frills of the so-called world-class city: flyovers, the metro, spanking new airports, malls and restaurants, ATMs and all the good things that the television advertisements of the previous government’s Bharat Nirman programme showed. On the other hand, there is the claim to governance that the AAP succeeded in effectively articulating, one that the subalterns crave – a reliable supply of simple basics like water and electricity delivered without being mediated by slumlords masquerading as elected representatives in unrecognized neighbourhoods, and functioning government schools and health centres.

These are arguably very different aspirations of governance. What the subalterns need and want is what the elites already have – whether through public provisioning of water and electricity, ostensibly subsidized for the poor but actually appropriated by the non-poor, or through private provision of education and health care, or through the hybrid model of the Public-Private Partnership.

What, today, are the possibilities of the Aam Aadmi Party acting as the custodian of the aspirations of the denizens of Delhi? Its rather modest showing in the Lok Sabha elections, where it won more seats in the Punjab than it did in Delhi, despite a minuscule increase in its vote share in the city, apparently encouraged the party to reconsider its rather hasty departure from office which it realized had cost it some political support. However, its clumsy attempt to resuscitate that arrangement has met with a time out message. Clearly, this young party has yet to come to terms with its own identity, to figure out whom it represents, and whether it is a party of the urban poor or a party that can be all things to all persons, rural and urban.

 

Perhaps inadvertently, in its brief life as the party of government, the AAP has opened up a hitherto unrecognized political space in which the governance aspirations of the urban poor find articulation. For the party to become the voice of these citizens it needs not only more wisdom and maturity than it has displayed so far, but also a scaling down of its national ambitions. It could plausibly reinvent itself as a party of the city, by contesting municipal elections, proving its ability to govern at the local level, and then going on to replicate its success across other cities.

Regardless of whether it is the AAP or some other party that responds to this need, large enough segments of Delhi’s population have shown that they feel strongly enough to put the weight of their ballot behind serious promises of the basic public services that enable a life of less indignity. The rapid urbanization we are currently witnessing suggests both a need and an opportunity for an effective party that has an understanding of, and sensitivity to, the problems of the urban poor.

 

Footnotes:

1. James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton University Press. Princeton, 2008.

2. Patrick Heller, Growth and Citizenship in Indian Cities: a Comparative Perspective. Annual Distinguished Lecture at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 19 November 2012.

3. Veronique D.N. Dupont, ‘The Dream of Delhi as a Global City?’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(3), May 2011; Gautam Bhan, ‘This is no Longer the City I Once Knew: Evictions, the Urban Poor and the Right to the City in Millennial Delhi’, Environment and Urbanization 21, 2009.

4. Sanjay Kumar, Changing Electoral Politics in Delhi: From Caste to Class. Sage, New Delhi, 2014.

5. Srinivasan Ramani, ‘The Aam Aadmi’s Win in Delhi: Dissecting it Through Geographical Information Systems’, Economic and Political Weekly 48(52), 28 December 2013.

6. Yogendra Yadav described this as ‘the second democratic upsurge.’ Cf. ‘Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in Electoral Politics in the 1990s’, in F. Frankel et. al. (eds.), Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000. Christophe Jaffrelot called it ‘the silent revolution.’ Cf. India’s Silent Revolution: the Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2000.

7. Srirupa Roy has argued, citing the AAP’s use of the metaphor of malik-naukar, that this was more an expression of proprietary or ownership democracy than of participatory democracy. ‘Being the Change: The Aam Aadmi Party and the Politics of the Extraordinary in Indian Democracy’, Economic and Political Weekly 49(15), 12 April 2014.