AAP’s RS nominations put a question mark on its party-with-a-difference tag

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), on Monday, March 21, declared its candidates for polls to the five Rajya Sabha seats from the state that will fall vacant on April 9. Riding on the recently-won brute majority of 92 MLAs in the 117-member Punjab Assembly, the success of the five AAP candidates – cricketer Harbhajan Singh, the party’s Delhi MLA Raghav Chaddha, IIT professor Sandeep Pathak and businessmen Ashok Mittal and Sanjeev Arora – is guaranteed.

However, much as the AAP would wish to build a narrative over the eclectic character of the list of its RS nominees, the choice of its candidates has led to an avoidable controversy within days of the formation of the new government led by Bhagwant Mann. The Opposition parties, particularly the Congress, have accused the ruling party of betraying the interests of Punjab by “auctioning away” tickets to outsiders such as Chaddha and Pathak and businessmen like Mittal and Arora.

Earlier spat

The furore, at least in part, is similar to the 2018 Rajya Sabha polls for three seats from Delhi that saw the AAP, backed with its massive majority in the Delhi assembly, nominate the party’s founding member Sanjay Singh alongside businessmen Sushil Gupta and ND Gupta. The AAP’s surprise decision to send the two Guptas to Parliament’s Upper House as its nominees had led to a public spat between chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his once-trusted aide Kumar Vishwas.

Vishwas was expelled from the party for openly accusing Kejriwal of “selling RS tickets”; the poet-turned-politician has since been a bitter critic of the Delhi CM, as the last few days of the Punjab poll campaign had amply demonstrated. Another prominent face of the AAP, journalist Ashutosh, who was until then seen as a frontrunner for a ticket to the Rajya Sabha, quit the party soon after Kejriwal informed his colleagues that the two Guptas, along with Singh, will be candidates for the three RS seats from Delhi.

Unlike 2018, the AAP’s current challenge, arguably, is not to convince its cadre in Punjab or Delhi of the rationale behind choosing the five RS nominees from its newly minted state. The sheer magnitude of the party’s assembly poll victory, coupled with the fact that unlike in Delhi, Punjab will have a far bigger chunk of corporations, boards and other bodies to which disgruntled leaders seeking office may be appointed and assuaged.

After all, Mann’s newly formed council of ministers too overlooked the claims for a ministerial berth by several party legislators who returned to the assembly as second-term AAP MLAs after resisting the temptations and pressures – and there was no dearth of these – to defect to the Congress or other rival parties between 2017 and 2022. Of the 10 ministers inducted in the Mann cabinet, as many as eight are first-time MLAs. Sunam MLA Aman Arora, Talwandi Sabo MLA Baljinder Kaur, Jagraon MLA Saravjeet Kaur Manuke and Budhlada MLA Budh Ram, who were all aspiring to get ministerial berths after their second consecutive victory, were excluded from the cabinet but put up no protest.

Party of Punjabis

It is, however, a problem of perception that the AAP has created for itself in finalising its RS candidates. The AAP had projected itself before the Punjabis as a party whose politics and policies will be distinct from the state’s traditionally entrenched outfits such as the Congress or the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), against whom – as the poll results showed – there was palpable frustration among voters.

Prioritising the interests of ordinary Punjabis – the aam aadmi of Punjab – over those of the elites with deep pockets was an inescapable message of the AAP’s poll campaign. The party’s RS nominees, however, largely fail on this touchstone. Similarly, the AAP has gone all out to flaunt its new-found reverence of Babasaheb Ambedkar to clearly beguile the state’s over 32 percent Dalit vote bank – the photos of Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh now adorn the wall behind Mann in the Chief Minister’s Office, edging out even Mahatma Gandhi. Yet, none of the party’s five Rajya Sabha candidates, nor its three RS members from Delhi, belongs to the Dalit community.

The AAP may still succeed in passing off its choice of sending Harbhajan Singh to the Rajya Sabha given the emotive chord that sports icons strike in the state. There are already rumours of Mann handing reins of a sports university in Jalandhar – Singh’s native town – to the cricketer and the party using him to attract more youth into its fold. However, it is Harbhajan Singh’s performance as the party’s MP from Punjab that will ultimately decide if he proves to be an asset for his party or becomes a liability just like another cricketer-turned-politician, Navjot Singh Sidhu, became for the Congress – or the BJP before that.

‘Problem candidates’

aThe other four candidates, however, appear more problematic. The AAP has obviously decided to reward Pathak for devoting nearly three years in rebuilding the party in Punjab from the booth level upwards and drawing the strategy that realised Kejriwal’s dream of expanding his party’s footprint beyond Delhi.

Pathak had been singled out for praise by Kejriwal when he interacted with the AAP’s Punjab lawmakers last week. It is no co-incidence that the nomination of the IIT professor, until now Kejriwal’s trusted backroom boy, to the Rajya Sabha coincided with the AAP also appointing him as the party’s prabhari (in-charge) for Gujarat where assembly polls are due in December and where AAP hopes to make significant in-roads at the cost of the listless Congress party.

Similarly, the AAP’s decision to nominate Chaddha, who at 33 years of age will become the youngest-ever Rajya Sabha member, is a reward for his handling of the party’s organisational affairs and campaign in Punjab. A national spokesperson of the party, Chaddha is also a sitting MLA from Delhi’s Rajinder Nagar assembly constituency and vice-chairman of the Delhi Jal Board. Through Chaddha’s meteoric rise as a politician, paling even that of his AAP contemporary Atishi, Kejriwal may want to project a suave face of the party.

Yet, the rationale behind Chaddha’s promotion seems skewed. In his own constituency of Delhi’s Rajinder Nagar, the AAP leader has largely been an absentee. During the Punjab poll campaign – the end results notwithstanding – many AAP leaders of the state repeatedly accused him of being arrogant. On one occasion during the selection of candidates, Chaddha was even accosted by AAP workers and accused of “selling tickets” while at a press conference, several local journalists had hit out at him for misbehaviour. With his election to the Rajya Sabha imminent, Chaddha will have to vacate his seat in the Delhi Assembly, and the AAP will surely win it back, but whose interest is the party serving in causing an unnecessary and avoidable by-election, is a question that it must be held to account for.

The AAP’s most inexplicable choices, however, remain those of Mittal and Arora. AAP insiders told The Federal that the two had been “major funders” of the party’s Punjab poll campaigns and had promised to help the party financially in its quest for expanding into states such as Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana. It was this same argument that the AAP leadership had used to justify – off-record, of course – nominating Sushil Gupta and ND Gupta to the Rajya Sabha in 2018, despite neither being a party member at the time nor being associated with the political struggle of the outfit.

The party has tried to justify nominating Mittal and Arora on grounds that the two belong to Punjab and have been involved in public service and philanthropy in the state for a long time.

Mittal is the founding chancellor of the Lovely Professional University, an institution known as much for its exorbitant fee structure as for its massive spending in advertisements to various media platforms. Arora, a Gurgaon-resident who hails from Punjab’s, is chairman and managing director of Ritesh Properties and Industries Limited that has offices across the country with interests in sectors ranging from garment manufacturing and exports to real estate, housing and development of industrial and commercial townships. One of Arora’s flagship projects is Ludhiana’s Hampton Business Park. Arora is also founding-chairman of the Krishna Pran Breast Cancer Care Charitable Trust.

The AAP can surely guard itself against accusations of awarding Punjab’s Rajya Sabha berths to non-Punjabis like Pathak and Chaddha and moneybags like Arora and Mittal on the ground that other outfits – Congress and BJP, in particular – have both done the same on countless occasions. But the question for the party should ideally be – weren’t you supposed to be different? Besides, Punjabi voters may also have expectations from the likes of Mittal and Arora in terms of raising their issues forcefully in Parliament. The performance of the two Guptas in Rajya Sabha, mostly absent and all too happy ceding space to Sanjay Singh in crucial debates, inspires little confidence that their counterparts from Punjab will be any different.

There are also murmurs within the AAP that the candidates, barring Harbhajan Singh, were all handpicked by Kejriwal in Delhi and that Mann was merely “informed of the party’s choices”. The current buoyancy in the party following the unprecedented victory in Punjab is expected to neutralise any threat posed from such murmurs. With Mann still trying to find his feet as a debutante administrator, he may even allow some leeway to Kejriwal’s allegedly meddlesome way. However, in the medium or long term, the party and Mann will have to confront – and resolve – the question of whether, like the Congress, it wants to run Punjab at the mercy of a Delhi-based high command.

The current Rajya Sabha nominations may be a small irritant within the party at the moment but may become more pronounced if the trend continues going forward. In end-June, two more Rajya Sabha seats from Punjab – presently held by Congress’s Ambika Soni and SAD’s BS Bhunder – will be up for elections. Will the AAP learn its lessons by then?