AAP & The Right Turn of The Leftists – Rupesh Kumar Singh
As now Aam Aadmi Party has formed its government in Delhi and Arvind Kejriwal has sworn in as the 7th Chief Minister of the state, it is quite important to analyze the role of parliamentary leftist parties in this whole electoral scenario.
If we go back to Anna movement we can see that from BJP to the parliamentary leftists, none left any stone unturned to play with the anti corruption wave. In a huge desperation, the ‘comrades’ tried all tricks to deliver speech from Anna’s podium but when they came to the stage in Rajghat, people denounced them and they were not even allowed to deliver their speech there. Then at the time of Kejriwal forming his own party, they echoed other parliamentary parties and declared that “this party will not work”. When Kejriwal put candidates for all 70 seats in Delhi and came out with AAP’s manifesto, leftists denounced it as absurd and the 5 leftist parties i.e. CPI, CPIM, CPIML (Liberation), Forward Block, SUCI(C) put candidates for 20 different seats.
Eventually, they surely have protested and campaigned against AAP in those constituencies but an astonishing incident happened as soon as the election results came out. Once the election results were declared their rhetoric got changed drastically. Although this is not the first instance of their changing rhetoric. Their history grossly is a history of opportunism.
In Bihar, sometimes they have campaigned against Lalu whereas there are many instances when they have supported him. Moreover they did the same thing with Nitish. In UP they sometimes embrace Mulayam and sometimes hit the street against him.
Anyways, we are here to focus on the recent Delhi assembly election. Their frequent changes in colour can be well understood if we see the number of votes that they got in this election.
CPI (M) got 684, 1199 and 121 votes respectively in Dwarka, Karawal nagar and Shahdara. CPI got 794, 745, 789, 643, 660, 498, 362, 699, 637 and 476 votes respectively in Babarpur, Chhatarpur, Mongolpuri, Narela, Okhla, Palam, Patpadganj, Simapuri, Timarpur and Trilokpuri constituency.
Meanwhile CPIML (Liberation) managed to gather 203, 338, 146 and 172 votes in Kondli, Narela, Patpadganj and Wazirpur respectively. ForwardBlock managed to collect 173 and 175 votes in Kirari and Mundka while SUCI(C) got 325 votes in Burari constituency.
Now even if we sum up all these figures, it will not match the number of votes AAP received in any single constituency. So as soon as election results were tending towards AAP, judgements and opinions of the parliamentary leftist leaders and ideologues got changed drastically.
The whole scenario reached a new level of derisory when results for all of the constituencies were out and suddenly their party general secretaries (CPIML-Liberation GS Dipankar Bhattacharya even gave hints of his party’s desire to join hands with AAP) [for the video of his statement click here ]
came out with press statements and unashamedly started trying to project and establish Kejriwal as an anti corruption hero. Meanwhile their MLAs started niggling about taking “lessons” from AAP in order to bring changes in the work-pattern of their respective organisations.
In fact it’s known to every concerned people that Kejriwal had been a famous NGO worker and a supporter of anti-reservation brigade. It’s also not a secret to anyone how NGOs mislead people whereas the AAP manifesto is full of agendas which have very close resemblance with that of any NGO. Moreover, AAP does not utter a single word on basic economic policies, inequality and state-promoted oppression.
But it did not stopped Sanjay Sharma, state secretary of CPIML (Liberation) in Delhi from welcoming the emergence of AAP in a press statement as “a powerful third force in Delhi” and he even went on saying “ AAP has brought to the fore a democratic agenda concerning basic demands and interests of common people. Emergence of AAP re-establishes the importance of movement based politics and also demonstrates people’s aspiration for an alternative against status quoist politics of Congress and BJP. Many questions regarding working class of Delhi were present in the AAP Manifesto and these eventually helped the party to garner their support”.
But this statement raises few important questions which demand some definite answers:
- If AAP has brought to the fore democratic agenda concerning basic demands and interests of the common people then what were YOU doing, COMRADES?
- If AAP has re-established the importance of movement based politics then what are YOU doing? Movement or Drama of a movement?
- In this context of electoral success of AAP, are you going to make these reformist policies as your central agenda in future?
We will be eagerly waiting for these answers comrades.
(This article was published in Hindi at hastakshep.com and has been translated from Hindi by Nilkrisna Mahata)