A New Party Challenges the One That Has Run India for Most of Its History

Campaigning for Arvind Kejriwal, the Aam Aadmi Party's candidate, in New Delhi. The party's name means Common Man.

By ELLEN BARRY

Published: November 19, 2013

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

NEW DELHI — Snaking down one of this city’s dusty back streets on a recent afternoon was a line of auto-rickshaws, the motorized buggies that course through this city by the tens of thousands, carrying ordinary citizens on their daily rounds. Unless you looked closely, you could miss the fact that they were part of a political insurgency.

One after another, drivers were plastering their vehicles with posters for the Aam Aadmi, or Common Man, Party, which hopes to end the ruling Congress Party’s 15-year dominance in Delhi in state elections two weeks from now.

The idea seemed quixotic at first. Founded last year out of the fading embers of an anticorruption street movement, the party had only one recognizable face, that of a former tax commissioner, Arvind Kejriwal. Most striking, it avoided the red-meat topics that drive most Indian political forces — caste, religion, region and family — focusing instead on the lone issue of stamping out corruption.

Seen from a distance, India’s forthcoming state elections are a gladiatorial showdown between the Congress Party, which has governed India for 53 of the last 65 years, and its Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party. But Aam Aadmi has broken that pattern in Delhi, in large part by capturing votes from the city’s working poor, a fast-growing group that has slipped out of Congress’s grip. Aam Aadmi has risen steadily in the polls, startling the heavyweights and setting the stage for a genuinely triangular contest.

Asked why they would use their vote on an untested newcomer, the auto-rickshaw drivers responded with a stream of grievances — over bribetaking transport inspectors and thuggish police constables, but also over the price of onions, registration fees, potholes and a growing sense of disconnection between the governing class and the governed.

“The common man is fed up,” said Pawan Kumar, extracting from his shirt a wad of paper documenting a fine that he had contested, desperately and fruitlessly. Nearby stood Gaurav, who said his frustration had grown so intense that whenever he overheard pro-Congress talk from passengers, he stopped his vehicle and told them it had malfunctioned.

“Congress has been the ruling party for the last 60 years,” said Gaurav, who does not use a surname and who migrated with his family to Delhi as a child. “They say all the right things, but look at the condition of the country. Other countries have come much farther in 60 years. Why don’t we have better medical facilities, educational facilities, roads? Why? Who is answerable for this?”

Even if Aam Aadmi wins only a small number of Delhi’s parliamentary seats — a real possibility, given India’s first-past-the-post system — it will challenge assumptions that have long undergirded Indian politics. Congress, with its socialist roots, addressed the rural and marginalized poor. Bharatiya Janata, created as a party of urban traders, spoke to more affluent, urban Indians, those more likely to hold Hindu nationalist views.

But that calculation is being scrambled in the black box of urban India, where new categories of voters are coming into existence.

Though the new party had little chance of winning the very rich (B.J.P. voters) or the poorest of the poor (Congress’s), the fat layer in the middle is expanding with waves of migration from northeastern provinces. Yogendra Yadav, a soft-spoken political scientist who has become Aam Aadmi’s main strategist, said support for Aam Aadmi had grown fastest among “those who are a little uprooted, who come and are lost for identity, lost for a grouping.”

Those who have latched on to the Common Man bandwagon include many in Delhi’s fast-growing informal economy — “this vast army of drivers, blacksmiths, locksmiths, cobblers, domestic workers, the guys who sell paan on the sidewalk,” said Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at Brown University. Voters like these interact constantly with low-level government officials, and their resentment has mounted to the point at which it trumps other political messages.

“There is a certain helplessness that comes from dealing with the malfunctioning state at the street level,” Mr. Varshney said. While more affluent people can “telephone their way through or bribe their way through,” he said, the working poor look to politicians to address their complaints. They vote, and in large numbers.

There are still some gaping holes in the new party’s platform, which is not surprising, considering the group’s swift transformation from a street movement. Though Mr. Kejriwal has pledged that his first major act will be arranging an independent ombudsman to look into complaints against government officials, the party has been slow to issue a clear manifesto beyond opposing corruption.

That has left it unclear where Aam Aadmi stands on basic political and economic questions. Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist, described the party’s appeal as superficial, “another way of saying ‘none of the above.’ ”

As its poll numbers have improved, the party has made compromises that smack of politics as usual, alienating purists who were among its early supporters. On Monday, as Mr. Kejriwal tried to counter a fresh rebuke from Anna Hazare, the Gandhian social activist who was his partner in the anticorruption movement, a man who identified himself as a Hazare supporter sprang up and flung a can of black ink at his face. Party leaders have quietly replaced some of their “common man” candidates with more politically experienced ones.

Mr. Yadav acknowledged that some of those decisions had been painful, but that party leaders had begun to feel “this close to actually making it” and become focused on running candidates who would be seen as viable.

“To be honest, I am stunned with the response that we are getting,” he said. “All I can say is that we have stepped into something not of our making.”

As the last days of campaigning ticked away, earnest volunteers continued to comb Delhi on Aam Aadmi’s behalf. Anita Pandey, 43, was plastering Kejriwal posters onto the back of auto-rickshaws on a recent afternoon. If a driver refused, saying the police were singling out drivers who carried the poster, she hectored him cheerfully and at high volume. “Why? Why?” she cried. “Show courage! If you will not show courage, who will?”

She worried, though, about what would happen when party workers began blanketing low-income neighborhoods with the freebies known here as sops, most often bottles of whiskey and 500-rupee notes.

Sure enough, a campaign worker from Bharatiya Janata — or rather the employee of a subcontractor, Adventure Media — showed up at the same spot a few days later, offering drivers brand-new lemon-colored canvas covers for their vehicles. The covers had a retail value of 500 rupees (about $8), a day’s take-home pay for many of them, and came complete with sewn-on campaign posters declaring support for the B.J.P.

The drivers murmured their admiration from across the street, debating whether accepting such a thing amounted to selling their vote. Each of them could recall the waves of gifts that arrived in their impoverished neighborhood ahead of elections, delivered in crates to the homes of the slum’s rainmakers, year after year.

A driver named Rakesh Kumar glanced over at the stack of auto-rickshaw covers and smiled. “Many people will take it, and they will paint it over,” he said. Then, he said, “we will vote for Kejriwal.”

Even the New York Times has started noticing the AAP