In 2013 when the debutant Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal contested against three-time Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, she had scornfully asked, “Who is Arvind Kejriwal? What is AAP. Is it a party that can be compared to the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party.”
Not only did Kejriwal go on to defeat the mighty Sheila Dikshit but his party subsequently wiped out the well-entrenched Congress from Delhi. While the grand old party is still struggling to recover lost ground in Delhi where it has no seats in the Assembly, the Congress was dealt another deadly blow by the nine-year-old AAP on Thursday.
The Kejriwal-led AAP registered a stupendous victory in the Punjab polls, winning a whopping 92 seats in the 117-member state Assembly, prompting an exultant AAP leader Raghav Chadha to declare that “the AAP is the natural and national replacement of the Congress”.
Chadha had reason to make such a declaration. After all, his party had decimated the Congress, reducing it to a mere 18 seats in Punjab. And if the Delhi example is anything to go by, the Congress will find it extremely difficult to recover from this humiliating defeat.
The Congress is already out of the reckoning in wide swathes of the country and after the latest round of losses, its footprint has shrunk even further. It now rules only in two states – Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh besides being a junior partner in Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.
The AAP, on the other hand, is on the rise. After Punjab, it has its eyes set on Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh which are going to polls later this year and will then expand to other states in its quest to become a national player. This spells serious trouble for the Congress. Having lost its social base to the AAP in Delhi and Punjab, it now faces the spectre of being squeezed out by the Kejriwal-led party in other states where it is locked in a direct fight with the BJP. It has been the Congress experience that it loses out whenever there is a third political party in the fray while a bipolar contest works to its advantage. The canny Kejriwal is on the path of upsetting this status quo.
Clearly, it is not the BJP which has to fear the AAP but it is the Congress which should be running for cover as it is gradually being replaced by the new party. The Congress faced the same fate in West Bengal where its vote shifted to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress and in Andhra Pradesh to Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSRCP.
As for Punjab, the Congress literally gifted the state to the AAP on a platter. Till six months ago, the grand old party looked all set for a second term as none of its opponents – the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) or the AAP – posed any serious challenge to it. While the SAD was still to recover from the bruising it received in the 2017 Assembly polls, the AAP too was not in good shape. Though it did win 20 seats in the last election and emerged as the principal opposition party in the state, the AAP witnessed defection of several senior leaders and subsequently posted poor results in the local elections and the 2019 Lok Sabha contest.
But the shoddy handling of the party’s internal affairs by former Congress president Rahul Gandhi provided a perfect opportunity to the AAP to stage a miraculous comeback. The Nehru-Gandhi scion first blundered by replacing Sunil Jakhar with Navjot Singh Sidhu as Punjab Congress president and then by changing the chief minister barely a few months before elections. This only ended up opening the proverbial can of worms. Veteran leader Amarinder Singh walked out of the party in a huff while Charanjit Singh Channi’s elevation as chief minister did not go down well with other senior leaders who were in contention for the top post.
The maverick Navjot Singh Sidhu went on a rampage, running down his own government in full public glare. Fed up of this constant bickering, an already-disillusioned electorate yearning for a change from the traditional mainstream political parties veered towards the AAP which held out the promise of running a corruption-free government and providing better civic services.
As the AAP embarks on its ambitious journey of replacing the Congress as the national alternative to the BJP in the near future, the grand old party has to make some tough choices if it does not wish to be wiped out. The party has to go in for drastic organisational changes, beginning at the very top. Congress president Sonia Gandhi must realise that her son Rahul Gandhi does not have the requisite skills to lead the party and should instead make way for fresh leadership from outside the Gandhi family.
Or else, it will soon be time to say RIP Congress.
The author is a senior journalist. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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