What is it about?
The Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party, AAP) has taken over part of the program of the Indian National Congress. The AAP was able to include new solutions within the traditional political repertoire. In Delhi the AAP took over the traditional Congress electorate but was also able to reach out to the middle-class voter.
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Why is it important?
This work covers the history of a new party in India - the Aam Aadmi Party - from its inception to its victory in the Delhi Assembly elections of 2015. The research is based both on written as sources as well as interviews conducted by the important members of the party at that time (the interviews were conducted by professor Adam Burakowski).
Perspectives
As Indian national politics - and Delhi politics in particular - were long dominated by the two biggest parties, the National Indian Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, Arvind Kejriwal's party, a newcomer without a strong external backing, strove to carve out a political space for its own, banking on the hugely popular India Against Corruption movement. AAP managed to remain between the two parties usually without allying with any of it. The erosion of the Indian National Congress' popularity meant that Aam Aadmi Party could tap into its electorate and chose to be the new party of the Indian Left, putting emphasis on socialism, fighting crony capitalism, addressing religious minorities and lower castes and referring to Gandhi's legacy by evoking the idea of participatory democracy.
Krzysztof Iwanek
War Studies University (Warsaw, Poland)
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: India’s Aam Aadmi (Common Man’s) Party, Asian Survey, June 2017, University of California Press,
DOI: 10.1525/as.2017.57.3.528.
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