Tuesday 24 September 2013

AAM AADMI PARTY - THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY

With the Delhi Assembly Elections and the General Elections just around the corner its natural to get political and to evaluate the options at hand. Given that Aam Aadmi Party is planning to contest the Delhi elections in November and have negligible presence on the National scene, I'll try to keep this thread focussed on the latter.

I, like most people supported the cause that Anna highlighted through his push for the Jan Lokpal bill and firmly believed that given the rot that has set into the political space in this country the only way to clean it up would be to get into politics and show people that there is a clean and honest way to conduct business (oops... politics). Therefore my support to the AAP came about quite naturally.

As I have gone about to share and propagate AAP's agenda across various forums, a lot of people have debated the good, the bad and the ugly and given below are my interpretations of those conversations:

Why join politics? Why can't you make a difference from outside? - Kejriwal and the others could have continued to support Anna, why did they have to join politics, maybe they just wanted to join politics in the first place and used Anna as a stepping stone. My Thoughts - Ever since I saw the movie "Yuva" I was convinced that the only way to see change is to be the change, especially if we talk about the political space in the country. When Anna was protesting on the Ram Leela grounds to exert pressure on the parliamentarians for enacting the Jan Lokpal bill, almost every politician was asking them to join politics. Well I applaud the AAP for calling their bluff and putting the efforts that none of us can dare to.

What's stopping them from turning corrupt once they gain power? - This is the most common argument that one seems to hear and who can blame us, we have been cheated, ignored, and robbed by all politicians (the exceptions are few and almost negligible). We all consider 'politics' as a dirty word, no one in their sane mind wants to be associated with it, let alone take part in it. My thoughts - The AAP has set some clear guidelines and rules for its functioning including an internal Lokpal. They even set some very clear guidelines and a rigorous interview process to select its candidates from all the constituencies. This is the most logical thing to do for any political party that has an intention of being honest and still almost none of them have even thought of trying this.



They'll never be able to gain a majority, why have a hung assembly. - They are really new in the political space with no real roots, sure they might win a couple of seats but don't kid yourself to believe that they will have a majority. Actually they might do more harm than good by creating a hung assembly. My Thoughts - The AAP has been around for less than a year and in this short time they have been able to generate the kind of buzz that is hard to ignore and shows that they have a lot of support. However, even I agree that it would be extremely difficult for them to get a majority in Delhi. The reason I would still support them is that (hung assembly or not) there is tremendous value if they can win some seats because it will force the other political parties to think differently and hopefully improve their internal processes.

Anna seems clean but I am not sure about this Kejriwal fellow and his ilk. - Anna Hazare has a clean image but I don't like this Kejriwal. He has a very arrogant personality and always seems to be finding faults in others. Also, weren't there some investigations against him? My Thoughts - Whenever someone tries to challenge the political class, they put everything at their disposal (the police, tax officials, media, CBI, CID etc) to dig out dirt against you and if that fails then they cook up stuff that just isn't there. The point is that if you dig long and hard enough you can find dirt about anyone (and I mean ANYONE). In any case, even with all their resources they have not been able to prove anything against Kejriwal. Also, we don't really need to worry about Arvind Kejriwal and his personality, what we should look at instead is that he has taken a very difficult challenge which would benefit us in the long-term. He has set up a party with the right guiding principles which has involved people from the grass roots and if they continuously try to improve themselves by doing meaningful retrospectives then they will get better in the long term.

Politics is more about just corruption, what is their stand on some of the other issues? - AAP has built their entire campaign around eradicating corruption but running this country is more than just handling corruption, so what's their take on some of the other issues plaguing this country. My Thoughts - This is one of the points that concerns me as well since I think their stand on some of the other issues are not very clear. However, if AAP can do nothing else but bring us some relief from corruption then their involvement is worth its weight in gold (at current inflated prices). Also, I think we all will agree that there is no shortage of good policies in the country but the problem is with their implementation, which is lacking due to administrative lethargy and corruption.