Aam Aadmi Party As Third Player in Punjab Politics
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ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Aam Aadmi Party as Third Player in Punjab Politics PRITAM SINGH Vol. 52, Issue No. 3, 21 Jan, 2017 Despite huge organisational and political blunders, the Aam Aadmi Party is still a substantial player in Punjab's electoral politics. It does not have the organisational network that the Akali Dal has nor a popular leader such as the Congress' Amarinder Singh. However, its emergence in the state has brought to the fore the issue of regional versus Delhi-centric control of party decisions and politics Punjab’s political arena which has had two main competitors, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and Indian National Congress (—henceforth, the Congress) saw the entry of a third key player, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) during the 2014 general elections. AAP won four Lok Sabha seats out of a total of 13 that it contested from Punjab (see Appendix 1). It not only lost every seat it contested elsewhere in the country but 414 out of the 434 candidates it fielded forfeited their security deposits. I attempt an explanation of this extraordinary electoral performance of AAP in Punjab in 2014 and examine its prospects for the 2017 state assembly elections. The key to capturing this difference in Punjab lies in understanding its recent political history and more specifically the emergence and suppression of two movements in its contemporary history along with the consequences of the suppression of those movements. These two movements are: the Maoist Naxalite movement of the late 1960s and the Akali morcha (agitation) of the early 1980s for the protection of Punjab’s river water rights and for other economic, political and religious demands, and the subsequent armed Sikh opposition movement against the Operation Blue Star army action at the Golden Temple in 1984. This article will attempt to throw light on these two movements to highlight both the similarities in the political culture of Punjab with the political culture in other states in India as well as the huge differences. I do not intend to imply that there is one uniform political culture in India outside Punjab. On the contrary, I firmly believe that there are massive interstate differences in India where I look upon the states as homelands of various ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 nationalities at different levels of their nationality developments. I merely aim to emphasise the specificity of Punjab’s political culture in contrast to the political culture in other states in India.[1] By analysing the emergence and suppression of the two movements mentioned here, and the political and cultural fallout from the suppression of those two movements, I hope to solve the puzzle of the amazing electoral success of AAP in Punjab while it miserably failed elsewhere in the 2014 general elections. It, of course, performed spectacularly well in the Delhi assembly elections in February 2015. The rest of the article discusses aspects of Punjab’s specificity, the Naxalite movement in Punjab and its suppression, the Akali movement and the armed Sikh resistance movement and its suppression, and the implications of the suppression of these two movements for the emergence of AAP as a political force. I will also discuss the current and future prospects of AAP in Punjab in the light of its past successes and its vulnerability due to the Haryana and non-Punjabi dimensions of its top leadership and also the Delhi-based over-centralised organisational structure of the party. Finally, I will examine, though briefly, the potentialities and limitations of the AAP challenge to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the semi-secular Congress. The Sikh Dimension One aspect of Punjab, which distinguishes it from all other states, is that it is the homeland of the Sikh people. Punjab is the only state where the Sikhs are in a majority. They constitute 1.7% of India’s population but about 58% of that of Punjab. About 77% of India’s total Sikh population is settled in Punjab in contrast to their marginal presence in a majority of the other states (see Appendix 2). The majority status for the Sikhs in Punjab is a relatively recent phenomenon which took place only after the territorial reorganisation of Punjab on a linguistic basis on 1 November 1966. This duality of the Sikh location – a minority in India but a majority in Punjab – is a continuing source of political conflict and tension between the Sikh majority Punjab and Hindu majority India. This duality offers a primary insight into understanding the difference between electoral trends in Punjab and most other states. The absence of the Narendra Modi wave in Punjab during the 2014 general election when it was considered to be the major influence in other states, especially in north and west India, is a telling illustration of this dialectic. ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Even when there is convergence of electoral trends in Punjab and the rest of India as, for example, during the emergence of the electoral success of regional parties in the 1967 assembly elections in many states or the anti-Congress vote in the general election after the Emergency, this convergence manifests itself through the regional specificity of Punjab. Both during the 1967 assembly elections and post-Emergency general election in 1977, the regional specificity in Punjab manifests itself through the massive electoral victories of SAD, which so far has been almost the sole articulator of Punjab’s regional interests and the Sikh community’s political aspirations[2]. This political monopoly of SAD is being questioned in the wake of political change brought about by the AAP upsurge in Punjab. The foundations of the Sikh faith, which imparts distinctive character to Punjab’s political culture, were laid by Guru Nanak (1469–1539) who came from an upper-caste Hindu Khatri background but rebelled, even as a child, against the practices of his parents’ faith. He soon matured as a great spiritual teacher, poet and communicator choosing Punjabi, the language of the masses in Punjab, as his medium of communication in opposition to Sanskrit and Arabic chosen by the priestly class of the two dominant religions—Hindu and Islam—of that time in Punjab. He attracted a community of followers who came to be known as “Sikh”—meaning disciple or follower (Singh 1994:1). His denunciation of the Hindu caste system and gender inequalities attracted many lower caste men and women mainly from the Hindu background but some from the Muslim background too to his fold. He also denounced the atrocities committed by the Moghul king Babur through powerful poetry and had to face a brief period of imprisonment before Babur realised that Nanak was not an ordinary political rebel and that he was a person of great spiritual learning. This was a period of great social and political turmoil in India especially in north India. Many other spiritual leaders such as Kabir, Ravi Das and Namdev, to mention just a few, were also preaching similar views as Nanak’s in other regions of what we now call India. Guru Nanak travelled to all corners of India and beyond to meet spiritual leaders of similar leanings and to also debate with and question the traditional religious figures. What distinguished him from other saints of the Bhakti period was that he understood the importance of an organisation for spreading his teachings. Therefore, before his death, he appointed his successor Guru Angad (1504–1552) as the second guru of his followers who had come to be called “Nanakpanthis” or more generally as Sikhs. ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 The fifth guru, Guru Arjan Dev (1563–1606), compiled the teachings of all the Sikh gurus but also of other spiritual teachers such as Baba Farid, Kabir and Ravi Das into a major work that came to be called Adi Granth and subsequently Shri Guru Granth Sahib (SGGS) which became the holy Sikh scripture.[3] It is clear from the teachings contained in the SGGS that the Sikh gurus applauded the ancient Hindu scriptures but also criticised a number of Brahmanical theological assumptions and religious practices.[4] The growing Sikh faith had to go through severe persecution but it not only survived but grew to such strength that one Sikh chieftain Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) became the sovereign ruler of the Punjab in 1799.[5] The independent sovereign state of Punjab that lasted for half a century was eventually annexed by the expanding British empire in 1849 and made a part of colonial India. A rich heritage of their own religious scripture and the memory of having been rulers of an independent empire impart a distinctive identity to the Sikhs and their homeland Punjab. This distinctive identity is a central component of the distinctive political culture of Punjab. An understanding of this distinctive political culture is critical to grasping the background to the emergence and suppression of the two movements and the consequences of that suppression for the response that AAP has received in Punjab. Naxalite Movement and AAP Three socio-economic and cultural processes can be identified as contributing to the emergence of the Naxalite movement in Punjab and especially in the form in which it emerged there. One, the split in the international communist movement between the pro- Soviet Union and pro-China blocs leading to a split in India’s communist movement was the overarching and visible factor in encouraging the emergence of the Naxalite tendency in Punjab’s communist movement.[6] Two, the 1968 radical upsurge in the youth and other radical movements all over the world contributed to radicalising the educated Punjabi youth and thus facilitated their attraction towards the Naxalite movement.[7] Third, a majority of the Punjabi youth that got attracted towards this movement came from Sikh religious and cultural backgrounds[8], and the history of the evolution of the Sikh community over the last five centuries shows a tendency towards armed struggle coexisting with a non-violent one (Singh 2007).