AAP-Congress alliance campaign in Delhi is a heady menagerie of ironies

Bitter rivals till a year ago, the two outfits not only have the tall task of unseating a BJP that has swept Delhi’s Lok Sabha seats for the past two consecutive elections but also of explaining the foundation of their alliance to their cadres and ordinary voters alike while simultaneously ensuring there aren’t any further rebellious desertions from their respective ranks.

Bigger challenges for Congress

These challenges are, of course, much bigger for the Congress, which has found its political ground steadily slipping to the AAP. The Congress’s failure to retain electoral hold over its once impregnable citadel has, over the past decade of crippling poll setbacks, already emasculated the party in Delhi.

It was, thus, no surprise that Lovely found a string of convenient excuses to quit his post last week belatedly accusing his party high command of going against sentiments of his Delhi unit colleagues to forge an alliance with the AAP and then, in a double whammy, picking ‘outsiders’ Kanhaiya Kumar and Udit Raj over old-time loyalists as candidates for two of the three constituencies that the Congress is contesting in the national capital. The only dyed-in-the-wool Congressman in the poll fray is former five-term MP JP Aggarwal from the Chandni Chowk constituency.

Spurred by Lovely’s outbursts and citing the same reasons, senior Congress leaders Naseeb Singh and Neeraj Basoya – both loyalists of the late Sheila Dikshit – quit the party on Tuesday (April 30). Speculation is rife that nearly a dozen other Congress leaders, including several former MLAs, are likely to follow the same path over the next few days as May 6, the last date of filing nominations for Delhi’s seven seats, draws closer.

A drowning AAP

A little over a decade after it was founded on an anti-corruption plank, the AAP has its own set of challenges to conquer; drowning as it is now in a tsunami of corruption allegations for which Kejriwal and his close aides Manish Sisodia and Satyendra Jain are in judicial custody while party MP Sanjay Singh is presently out on bail.

Though nowhere comparable to the Congress, the AAP too has faced its share of desertions in recent months, including that of Kejriwal’s cabinet colleague Raaj Kumar Anand. With Kejriwal, the AAP’s chief mascot, languishing in Delhi’s Tihar Jail with little hope of getting bail before polling concludes in Delhi on May 25, the party has had to rely on his wife, along with AAP leaders Sanjay Singh, Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann, Atishi and Saurabh Bhardwaj, to lead a poll campaign whipping up sympathy and anger, in equal measure over the Delhi CM’s incarceration.

Tangled web

It is in this complex backdrop that the AAP and Congress are contesting Delhi’s four and three Lok Sabha seats, respectively, weaving a tangled web of a poll campaign that at times appears like an unintentional comedy.

With the likes of Arvinder Lovely, Naseeb Singh and Neeraj Basoya breathing fire at the alliance and raking up Kejriwal’s acerbic attacks of the no-so-distant past against former Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Sheila Dikshit, leaders from the AAP and Congress are now busy explaining to puzzled voters why the two parties had to “come together to save democracy from Narendra Modi’s dictatorship”.

Yet, that the public, despite vocal expressions of support for the jailed Kejriwal, isn’t entirely in thrall of the AAP’s alliance with the Congress is evident in how leaders of the two parties are being confronted by ordinary voters on an almost daily basis.

Last week a video went viral of AAP’s New Delhi candidate and Malviya Nagar MLA Somnath Bharti fumbling his way through while trying to explain to a group of purported AAP supporters why his party “allied with those you called corrupt”. Interestingly, Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi will all have to vote for the AAP’s Bharti as they are registered as voters in the New Delhi Lok Sabha constituency, which their own party will not be contesting this time.

What a 'sangam'

In the Chandni Chowk constituency, voters – Congress and AAP supporters alike – were amused to hear Aggarwal liken the alliance between the two parties to Sangam, the confluence of the holy Ganga and Jamuna rivers at UP’s Allahabad, during his joint campaign alongwith local AAP leaders on Tuesday (April 30). What was equally amusing was to hear AAP leaders present at the campaign reciprocate Aggarwal’s overture by singing paeans for the late Sheila Dikshit, who Kejriwal once famously promised to put in jail on corruption charges.

Sources in both parties admit that “selling” the alliance to the electorate is “very tricky”.

An AAP leader who has been put in-charge of mobilising his party workers for Kanhaiya Kumar in one of the assembly segments of the North East Delhi constituency told The Federal that though his party believes that “at least three of AAP’s four candidates will fare well in the Lok Sabha polls, this alliance could backfire for us when Delhi goes for assembly elections (next year)”.

This AAP leader said supporters of his party and the Congress alike are “not fully convinced” about the alliance given the past acrimony between the two parties and the fact that Kejriwal rose to political prominence largely on an “anti-Congress plank” and “accusing Sheila Dikshit of being Delhi’s most corrupt politician”.

The leader added, “when we first came to power in 2013 without a clear majority, the Congress gave us unconditional outside support but within a year, we broke that alliance because the people were not happy with Kejriwal’s decision to take Congress’s support… the political situation may be very different now but it is still difficult to explain to our supporters why we have had to come together; many think we are only doing the alliance to save Kejriwal and not for democracy”.

Dikshit and Kanhaiya factors

For the Congress, the complications are multi-linear and compounded manifold due to its own organisational morass. For the 15 years that she ruled Delhi as CM, Sheila Dikshit was the party’s anchor in Delhi. Her intra-party rivals such as Ajay Maken and JP Aggarwal have tried and failed to keep the party united over the past decade. Maken’s attempts to corner Kejriwal politically too have repeatedly come a cropper while the Congress’s crisis of attrition has steadily got worse.

Old Congress loyalists still reminisce about Dikshit’s governance and the way she transformed Delhi’s infrastructure. Her son and Congress’s former East Delhi MP Sandeep Dikshit, alongwith a majority of party leaders in Delhi who once owed their electoral dominance to Sheila Dikshit, have been bitter critics of Kejriwal all along. Sandeep Dikshit, the former Delhi minister Kiran Walia, former Delhi Congress chief Anil Chaudhary were among the original complainants against Kejriwal in the many investigations that the AAP convenor and his colleagues are currently mired in.

For Congress’s in-house critics of the alliance, like Lovely, or others who are waiting to quit the party at the ‘right time’, Kejriwal’s past vitriol against the late Sheila Dikshit remains the easiest bogey to raise while slamming the pact with AAP and making it electorally unsteady. For Kanhaiya, already a polarising political figure due to his own controversial past as a student leader heavily besmirched by the BJP, this makes the North East Delhi contest as a joint Congress and AAP candidate all the more difficult.

In 2019, Sheila Dikshit had contested her last election from the same seat that Kanhaiya is contesting from today and she had lost the battle by a massive margin of 3.66 lakh votes to the BJP’s Manoj Tiwari, who is once again in the poll fray. Lovely’s accusations at Kanhaiya of “undermining” the legacy of Sheila Dikshit by “squarely and wrongly crediting Kejriwal” for building Delhi’s education and medical infrastructure, thus, displays a certain political savvy.

It has compelled Kanhaiya to campaign in the constituency with an image of the late Delhi CM always looming large in the background – a constant and disturbing reminder to Congress workers of not just Sheila’s memory but also of the allegations she had to face in her final years from Kejriwal and the AAP.

A baffling dual role

And then there is the usual politically baffling decision-making process of the Congress party. In wake of Lovely’s resignation, the Congress has now appointed Devendra Yadav as interim chief of the party’s Delhi unit. Yadav, a young leader who like many others in the Delhi Congress was once mentored by Sheila Dikshit, may have been a good choice for the job but for the fact that he also simultaneously holds charge of the party’s affairs in Punjab.

The Congress and AAP may be allies in Delhi, Haryana and Gujarat but the two parties remain bitter rivals in Punjab and are fighting the elections against each other for the state’s 13 Lok Sabha seats. Worse, the AAP has been poaching Congress leaders in Punjab ahead of the elections and also stands accused by the state’s Congress leadership of “practising the BJP’s politics of intimidating political rivals by levelling fake cases against them”.

As such, as the new DPCC chief while Yadav will be required to bat for the Congress-AAP alliance in Delhi, he will have to slam the ‘ally’ while joining his party candidates on the campaign trail in Punjab.

Knots to untangle

With polling in Delhi barely three weeks away, the two allies have a surfeit of knots to untangle while they simultaneously attempt to dislodge the BJP.

Sources say the two parties have begun discussions on ramping up their joint campaigns. Appeals have been made to Kejriwal’s wife, Sunita Kejriwal, as well as Congress’s leadership troika of Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi by the two parties to canvass for the alliance candidates in Delhi. Whether this would be enough to tide over the alliance’s complexities at the grassroots though remains to be seen.