AAP’s political gambit in Delhi

The Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) decision to pick Atishi, 43, to succeed Arvind Kejriwal as the Delhi chief minister (CM) does not come as a surprise since she had become the face of the government after the latter’s arrest in the Delhi liquor case in March. She has been handling a large number of ministries and overseeing developmental works in the national capital. Her immediate task will be to make the most of her elevation to high office by convincing the bureaucracy to execute her party’s governance agenda. Both Delhi and the AAP would benefit if the new CM could energise the administrative machinery and address the pressing infrastructure issues of the capital.

The AAP will need a big push on governance since that is the only plank it can fall back on when it seeks another term in office. It started on an anti-graft plank in 2013 but reinvented itself as a party of governance in office, so much so that it contested elections outside the national capital promising the Delhi model of good governance and development. The party has lost sheen on both claims. It has spent the past two years battling the office of the Lieutenant Governor over the mandate to rule and the jurisdiction over administration. And legal trouble over the controversial liquor policy cast a shadow over its promise of probity and transparency. The AAP, thus, needs a new narrative to reclaim the political ground it had lost in the past few months.

In any case, a decade in office can lead to anti-incumbency. A change at the top of the government has been a tactic many political parties have tried to deflect anti-incumbency in assembly elections with varying success. The choice of a woman CM — even though this is a holding job as Atishi herself has put it — may resonate with women voters in Delhi: The last Congress CM of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit, was a popular figure for most of her 15 years in office, and the record of leaders such as J Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee suggests that gender can influence electoral choices. The AAP can surely do with some additional votes.

How far a new face, a young leader who is yet to prove her credentials as an administrator and a mass leader, can help the AAP politically is anybody’s guess. But Kejriwal’s politics of victimhood did not yield political dividends in the recent general election — the AAP failed to win a single seat despite an alliance with the Congress. Atishi as CM suggests a change of track that may help the AAP wrest the narrative. And most importantly, it provides Kejriwal the space and freedom to return to his streetfighter and mobiliser avatar.