Two views of Aam Aadmi Party

Veteran crusader Anna Hazare praised the Aam Aadmi Party led by his one-time protege Arvind Kejriwal, and said the members were “social workers, not political workers.” The endorsement came on a day when the AAP was seeking a vote of confidence in the Delhi Assembly.

The impact of the AAP’s style of governance is being felt in other parts of the country too, he said. “It is because of them that politicians are thinking differently. The Maharashtra government is also thinking of subsidising power.”

Warning the Congress against withdrawing support, Mr. Hazare said, “If the Congress withdraws support, it will send a wrong message to the country. People will teach them a lesson in the Lok Sabha elections.”

The anti-graft activist said he would resume his fight, this time by travelling across the country to raise awareness about rights. “We will demand a Right to Reject and a Right to Recall parliamentarians if they are not performing well.” His new set of demands will also include the provision for citizen’s Parliament.

I have always been saying there is no difference between the process adopted by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, only their roads are different. I am glad that Anna has realized the same and will understand how the Congress and BJP used him as a pawn to pass the Jokepal Bill to put a brake to Arvind Kejriwal's AAP.

Without revealing the party’s hand on whether the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) could be a potential ally, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat on Thursday said the virtues the new party claims for itself and its agenda of social justice, democratisation and decentralisation of power has long been the Communist programme.

Mr. Karat made these observations in a detailed article in the forthcoming issue of the party organ People’s Democracy in a bid to clear the air on the CPI(M) position vis-à-vis the AAP.

However, he did not answer the question the media has been posing on a possible alliance between the two parties. In fact, AAP leader Prashant Bhushan was quoted in a newspaper report as stating that the party would not tie up with the CPI(M) as corruption had seeped into its rank and file.

Acknowledging that the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s appeal to the middle class and youth was blunted by the AAP, Mr. Karat added: “However, the AAP’s stand on communalism and its attack on the communal Hindutva agenda were absent. Can the AAP ever hope to present itself as an alternative without taking a clear-cut stand against communalism?”

He also questioned if the AAP had an alternative to neo-liberalism, adding that there was a tendency to gloss over these matters “perhaps due to the contradictions that exist in the social base” of the AAP.

Noting that the AAP’s rapid rise has been “generally welcomed by the democratic and secular circles in the country,” Mr. Karat said: “The involvement of a normally apolitical middle class and attracting the youth to political activism with idealism is a singular achievement.”

If the above is the view of the CPM then I would like AAP to be different. Look what mess the CPM has done in Bengal and Kerala. On the other hand the CPM has done exceedingly well in Tripura under the present Chief Minister, Manik Sarkar who was elected for the 4th term in 2013. So in some cases the person is more important than the party and in other cases, the party is more important than the person. In the recent elections in Delhi, the AAP put up completely unknown faces but they all won because of Arvind Kejriwal and his AAP. The CPM is trying to cobble up an alliance with the help of a motley group of diverse political parties whose aims and ideas are as far from each other as the North and South Poles and whose only aim seems to be to form a government by displacing both the Congress and the BJP and which has as many prime ministerial candidates as there are parties.

God save India from such well-wishers.

AAP would do well to avoid the CPM rhetoric like the plague.