2020 Delhi Elections with Professor Neelanjan Sircar

Professor Neelanjan Sircar is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR). He has written extensively on elections in India, democratic backsliding, party systems, and voting behaviour. With the Delhi elections taking place this weekend, our Editor of News speaks to Professor Sircar about local issues in Delhi, BJP’s strategy of polarisation, Arvind Kejriwal’s charismatic leadership, and more. The elections will be held on the 8th of February and results will be declared on the 11th. 

What issues do you think are at the forefront of the upcoming Delhi elections?

Much like at the centre, everything is sort of arrayed around what Modi has done or what BJP has done — either you’re for it or against it. Delhi seems to have a very similar dynamic with respect to Kejriwal. AAP very much is going to run partially on Kejriwal’s charisma and popularity, particularly among lower-middle class and poorer voters, but also on its delivery in the areas of health and education, electricity and water. The BJP has traditionally had a very weak state unit and one that isn’t quite happy with the national unit. The BJP strategy has been to try to generate some polarisation in the electorate on identity-based terms or against protestors who are involved in the anti-CAA protests to see if that is something that will draw voters to the BJP. And the main reason for that is that they don’t have a face that can match Kejriwal’s charismatic authority at the state level. 

Will the protests have a significant effect on the elections? Recently, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) pulled out of its alliance with the BJP because of the latter’s stance on CAA. (SAD, despite continuing to oppose CAA and NRC, has since reconciled with the BJP and ridiculed claims of the split). 

The honest answer is — we don’t know yet, and as of right now I think even insiders in the BJP feel that the Aam Aadmi Party is quite a bit ahead, but a lot of polarisation can take place during electoral campaigns. So it’s hard to see right now how the BJP might win but we’ll have to see as the election draws very, very close. What I would say that is a contributing factor here — it’s a phenomenon that we’ve seen across most of the recent state elections — is that the BJP performs very differently in state and national elections. It’s Modi and Amit Shah’s strategy to centralise power within the party, so they’re willing to generate weaker state units, weaker chief ministerial candidates because that reduces factionalism within its party. In a real sense, they’re not willing to put their best foot forward in state elections in order to maintain a certain level of power centrally within the party. And so that constrains what the BJP can do in terms of its electoral appeal — it can run on Modi, it can run on a certain level of polarisation, but it can’t really run on the performance of its state unit. 

Has the BJP stretched this strategy to an extreme in Delhi, it being the seat of Modi and Shah’s power, where they are not even in a position to field competitive candidates, let alone a weak chief ministerial candidate?   

I think, in a genuine sense, that the state unit already wasn’t the strongest unit and has been further decimated under Modi and Amit Shah. If you talk to state workers — people who have worked for the BJP for a long time in Delhi — they are very unhappy with Manoj Tiwari, they’re very unhappy with the leadership, even, that has been given to them at the state level. That fits with what Amit Shah and Modi want — somebody who doesn’t have gravitas themselves or charismatic authority themselves is someone who can be controlled much more easily from the centre. But it does create a lot of dissension between the state unit and the national unit of  the BJP. 

AAP released a ‘report card’ on the work they have done over the last 5 years. Lokniti-CSDS also published a series of reports on Delhi governance based on various factors. How would you evaluate AAP’s performance? 

I think that broadly their performance is viewed very positively. The challenge in Delhi — and I remember somebody high up in the Aam Aadmi Party telling me this — is that Delhi has a significant population that is upper-middle class and above. These are people who, not just in Delhi, but all across the country have essentially opted out of serious engagement with the state. They go to private hospitals, they go to private schools — that is true, of course, with a number of people at Ashoka, as well. They get electricity through generators, water through tanks that they have in their buildings. Now, this is the population that is particularly vulnerable to the polarisation strategy. So, while we can say that the AAP’s governance has perhaps been good with the population that has benefitted from its schemes, Delhi is a bit of an outlier in the extent to which there is a significant population that doesn’t have a serious interface with the state. Especially given the fact that Delhi does not have full statehood, it’s a union territory, and certain key functions —for instance policing, law and order — are not under the Delhi government, they’re actually under the centre.

The reports and surveys strongly suggest that AAP will remain in power. Would you agree with that?

Absent of more information — sure. I think we don’t know what’s coming. We have seen, for instance, Delhi police’s powers vis-a-vis detention in the last week. We know that a special parliament session has been called before the budget. And so, one of the strategies of this government has been to move around issues of Moral Code of Conduct by appealing to security and law and order, which need not necessarily be something that the Election Commission can control. So we don’t know necessarily what the BJP’s national strategy is, and we don’t know what kind of polarisation will be created. As of right now, I think most people will agree that the Aam Aadmi Party is ahead. What things will look like a couple of days before is a function also of the extent to which the BJP is able to polarise the electorate.

What does AAP owe its success to? Kejriwal’s leadership, their governance in Delhi, or the various schemes they have rolled out?

There are two things — if there’s one thing that could potentially work against the Aam Aadmi Party, it is that they have essentially decimated the Congress. So, to the extent that we have constituency-level fights, they have been AAP-BJP fights. It isn’t as if Congress has played spoiler. They have eaten away a lot — pretty much all — of the non-BJP vote. The second thing is that the Aam Aadmi Party is remarkably popular with what they call the Purvanchali vote — people from UP and Bihar — and it’s a very large percentage of the population in Delhi. More than 50% of the population is a migrant population, it is a migrant city, and the popularity of the Aam Aadmi Party with the two of the largest reservoirs of migrants makes it a formidable opponent for the BJP. 

The BJP faced setbacks in Haryana and Maharashtra, ultimately not forming the government in the latter. It was also ousted in Jharkhand. Will voters in Delhi be similarly focused on local issues or might national issues play a part? 

I think what we saw in those three states is that phenomenon I was talking about. You had chief ministers who did not have an electoral base or charismatic authority of their own, irrespective of how they’ve performed. But if we do believe that part of Modi’s success is his charismatic authority – the ability to draw people to him and then vote for BJP – then that’s also true at the state level. Other parties that may have more charismatic leaders than who the BJP is putting up may have a discernible advantage in the elections. The elections were, of course, fought on state-level issues but I’m not sure whether national-level issues or social polarisation hasn’t driven electoral outcomes in state elections (UP is a good example of that). But, I do think that the relative lack of popularity of the BJP face versus a fairly popular regional party face (a phenomenon that can now be seen across many states) has caused problems for the BJP in state elections.

AAP is fielding several Congress defectors — Shoaib Iqbal, a 5-time Congress MLA being one of them. Do you think voters in Delhi are more affiliated to a party or a candidate? 

The way to think about this is that the vast majority of people voting for the Aam Aadmi Party are not going to be voting for the candidate, they’ll be voting for Kejriwal or the Aam Aadmi Party as a whole. That makes sense given the relative lack of power an MLA has in the system vis–a–vis the Chief Minister, in terms of how policies are made and how people vote. Now, what that means as a candidate is that if you believe that the Aam Aadmi Party is likely to win, and your continued success and ability to serve (either bad things i.e. corruption or good things i.e. being able to do things for your constituents) is highly dependent upon being re-elected. Then, it is in your strategic interest to defect and join the other party, especially given the relatively non-ideological (with respect to political preference), non-partisan nature of Indian politics. So it makes it easy for candidates to jump from party to party. On the other side, a party is almost always electoral-seeking — it is willing to field the most winnable candidate in a constituency. The actual identity of the candidate matters very little. So, it’s a win-win. If I have somebody who has been relatively popular willing to join my party, I’m willing to field them because they’re likely to win and if I believe that the other party is more likely to win and I need to stay in power, then I’m willing to jump to the other party. This, again, is due to the fact that partisan stability is very low — unlike the United States where it’s highly unlikely a Democrat will jump to the Republican party and vice versa. There is ideological and partisan homogeneity and stability — that’s not the case here. 

We keep coming back to Arvind Kejriwal as a charismatic leader and the face of AAP. What is it about him that appeals to people so much? 

I think it’s a difficult question to answer — what do charismatic leaders have at their disposal that others don’t? Being a good speaker, able to pick up certain issues — I think all of that is correct. I think it (the rise of Kejriwal) came at a particular time when Sheila Dikshit, also a charismatic leader for the Congress Party, was on the downslide and was vulnerable. I think he rose explicitly through the anti-corruption movement but at a time when there was a lot of frustration with corruption in the country. Populism is tied to a politician’s ability to intervene in state affairs and the bureaucracy. You see this very strongly with Modi and the extent to which he intervenes and manipulates state institutions. I think that even if you are someone who likes Kejriwal, you shouldn’t deny the fact that he has been very aggressive in dealing with his local state bureaucracy in order to get certain things done. Even if in the long run it’s not good for democratic norms, it tends to be popular in a place like India. We can look at the long sweep of politics from the 1990s and the most popular leaders you can think of — from Lalu to Mamata to Sharad Pawar to Kejriwal — are all people who have been able to aggressively bind state institutions to political will. 

AAP hasn’t made its presence felt at any of the anti-CAA/NRC protests across the city in contrast to Congress, and the TMC in West Bengal. Do you think this is a strategic move? 

Absolutely. I think the old Kejriwal would have shown up at JNU, he would have shown up on top of a car — AAP has talked about it very openly that they’ve been advised against this precisely for the phenomenon that I said, that the BJP’s most obvious tactic is to polarise the electorate. So anything that they can do to prevent higher levels of polarisation from showing up in the Delhi electorate, they’re willing to do it even if it means swallowing their pride. 

What do you think of the change in Kejriwal’s leadership style — from heading the anti-corruption movement to distancing himself from protests?

Given the national result of the 57% of the Union Territory voted for the BJP, it means that among the electorate many people did not see Kejriwal’s battling with Modi favourably. He has become more attuned to electoral-seeking than he probably was in the past. That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a formidable electoral opponent before, but perhaps some of his decisions weren’t necessarily guided by what was most electorally beneficial. Given recent outcomes, he’s become more focused on the electoral purpose. 

Will you be doing any work as a part of CPR or in your own capacity with respect to the elections?

CPR is doing some work — some low-level work in a few constituencies at various units. It’s a big organisation — there’s an urban team, so there are some people trying to understand what’s happening in urban politics. There are people who are explicit political analysts like Rahul Verma. There’s the accountability initiative trying to understand what’s happening in local-level bureaucracy. So, I think that all of them are engaged in various ways. I am doing a little bit of light work. But I’ll also say that because it is Delhi, unlike the work I’ve undertaken in other states, it is extensively covered by policy types and journalists. My own incentive right now is to find a small niche, maybe a couple of bastis, and try to understand how their lives have changed and bring up those stories rather than to make a more general claim of what’s happening across Delhi.