By Rajesh Kasturirangan
The victory of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) gives even the most cynical among us a reason to believe in the possibilities of politics. Critics might claim that AAP’s victory is a fluke or worse, an acceptable form of protest within a neoliberal order but the victory doesn’t seem like a fluke to me. The absence of the mainstream political parties on the ground – their candidates were simply incapable or unwilling to go from door to door and listen to people – gave AAP the space to build a real grassroots campaign and they seem to have profited enormously from their diligence. I can’t say much about the party’s position in the neoliberal order, since it’s too early to say anything about the accommodations that AAP will be making over the course of its development as a political party.
As we reflect on the success of the Aam Aadmi Party and support their efforts, we should also ask ourselves whether AAP is a portent of a new form of politics. That’s the only reason why we should be interested in its fortunes. Frankly, I don’t care much about AAP’s triumphalism or the jealousy of its critics. At least the first is understandable, as people who were kept out of power are suddenly waking up to a new dawn. The latter is sour grapes at best and far less charitable things at worst.
Now, let me speculate about the iceberg of which AAP is a tip. It’s clear that AAP is part of a series of movements that swept across the globe, from West Asia and North Africa to India, Russia and the United States and Western Europe. While these movements have learned a little bit from each other, there isn’t any evidence of systematic learning or common ideology that drives these movements. Some were anti-corruption movements, others were aimed at oppressive regimes and yet others were responses to the financial crisis.
The term post-ideological is a good characterization, only because no current ideology unifies these disparate groups. If I was to use a term to describe them, I would use “organic” not because they lack foresight or political aims, but because they arose within a matrix of conditions that characterize their particular milieu. If that seems too amorphous and directionless, consider the following fact:
Capitalism in the 21st century itself is an amorphous and directionless beast.
This isn’t a weakness but a strength of capitalism. The ability to move finance from one corner of the earth to another in seconds, the ability to transact almost as fast as the speed of light, the ability to accommodate almost every national and cultural dispensation and the ability to adapt to ever changing modes of production and labor. That amorphousness makes capitalism a hard target to attack for there’s no center there.
The financial class might have been the first to take advantage of this new human condition aided by technology but really a new form of consciousness. People are smart though, and they will learn new forms of organization wherever they arise. What if we are seeing a new political consciousness emerging that has internalized these new forms of capitalist organization and is replicating those structures in politics as well?
Consider how AAP has focussed on a tactical (end corruption) rather than an ideological goal. Sure, that might be smart because it’s various constituencies might not be able to agree on anything else. However, that masks the other side of the same equation: a tactical goal was able to bring millions of people together. In the past, people have needed strategic and ideological goals in order to organize at that scale. The fact that a tactical goal was able to bring millions together suggests a tacit awareness of something larger, a political consciousness that’s only beginning to emerge and doesn’t want to be defined in older terms.
What does that mean for the earlier era of political formations: from nation states to political parties and ideological disputes? Does it mean that all of these categories are exposed to critique or worse, elements of an older human condition whose time has gone?
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Find Rajesh Kasturirangan on twitter @rkasturi