Aam Aadmi Party, Neoliberalism, and the Working Class

 

 

Introduction 

 

In April 2022, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) went on to demolish several homes, in the slums of Jahangirpuri. The demolitions continued even after a Supreme Court order was issued against the same. Leaders of left parties appeared at the spot and stood steadfastly in front of the bulldozers. Due to their interventions, the bulldozers stopped further demolitions.

 

The locality in question is inhabited by residents resettled there by the state, after they were evicted from other localities. A significant section of them are informal sector workers. The population is overwhelmingly Muslim, consisting of those who migrated there from regions of West Bengal. They are systematically demonized and branded as illegal immigrants, foreigners, Bangladeshi, or Rohingya.

 

It came as no surprise to anyone that the BJP leaders were jubilant during the slum demolitions. The BJP-sympathetic media channels were openly celebrating this brutality. It perpetrated their anti-Muslim and anti-working-class agenda.

 

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader and Chief Minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal did show some grievance about the incident. However, spokespersons from the party went on to feed the xenophobic narrative of the residents being illegal immigrants. They seemed eager to prove that they too hated the slum dwellers who do not deserve any right to house in the city.

 

A Brief History of the Aam Aadmi Party

 

The electoral victory of the AAP through an overwhelming majority in the 2015 Delhi Legislative Assembly elections, was preceded by the anti-corruption movement that took off in 2011. The anti-corruption movement mobilized the anti-incumbent public sentiments against the Congress party that had been the main ruling party in the country. The movement echoed the mood of various sections of society, giving it a cross-class participation, although the dominant narrative of the movement remained uncritical of the policy regime that facilitated corporate loot of our resources. It used the Gandhian narrative of Swaraj after sixty-four years of independence to explain politics not in terms of power structures, political economy, and the contradictions therein, but a form of moralistic battle of the right and the wrong. The figurehead of the anti-corruption movement was Anna Hazare, who was branded as a modern-day Gandhi.

 

A section of people in the anti-corruption movement were open about their sympathies for the RSS, and far-right Hindutva politics in general. This was embodied by the initial ties that were forged by Kejriwal, with communalist godmen such as Baba Ramdev and RSS ideologues. However, the leaders of the movement realized that in order to succeed, it had to forge ties with various social movements. The movement was able to attract important figures from the National Alliance for People's Movements.

 

The AAP was formed in 2012, following a split between Anna Hazare who wished to follow the path of spirituality and hunger strikes to free society from the evils of corruption, and Kejriwal who wanted to enter electoral politics with a claim to repair it from within.

 

After the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly elections, the AAP formed the government with support from members of the Congress, and with Kerjiwal as the Chief Minister. Kejriwal resigned after 49 days, on having failed to pass the Jan Lokpal bill (an Ombudsman bill), which was one of the core rallying points of the anti-corruption movement that had brought him to power in the first place.

 

Despite attracting people with left-leaning credentials, the movement's middle-class composition didn’t change. The internal dynamics of the party grew exceedingly authoritarian, with some of its critical and left-leaning voices being removed, which led few others to resign. There was a concerted effort to appeal to the working class, by promising policies that would include affordable water supply, and conduct an audit of Delhi’s electricity distribution companies. A significant section of workers did support the AAP, as did a section of Dalits. The policies passed however carried little material weight in the lives of working people and were mainly of populist rhetoric. In this context, Praful Bidwai observes^[2]:

 

“More than one-third of Delhi’s households, typically poor, don’t have piped-water connections, and will be effectively excluded. Little will be done to improve the supply to water-deprived areas or break the water-tanker mafia’s stranglehold.”

 

Bidwai further says, “Take electricity. Private distribution companies (discoms) have been overcharging consumers through meter-tampering, cost-padding, etc. AAP should have ordered an audit, and then proceeded towards tariff reduction. Instead, it raised subsidies to discoms!”

 

It is to be noted that the electricity subsidy seldom extends to those who live in rented accommodations, thus excluding a vast majority of the city’s working population. The AAP led Delhi government has done nothing to ensure that the landlords do not make further profits by denying the tenants the benefits of the subsidy. So much for the AAP’s commitment to fight corruption!

 

The AAP had a strong majority in the 2020 Delhi Legislative Assembly elections, as well as in the 2022 Punjab Legislative Assembly elections. Presently, the party stands elected in both Delhi and Punjab state governments.

 

Theorizing Neoliberalism in India

 

The year 2011 marked the completion of two decades of the implementation of neoliberal policies in the Indian labor market. On this occasion, analyst Praful Bidwai wrote^[3],

 

“The fruits of growth have accrued largely to the top 10-15% of India's population. Growth hasn't raised the incomes of the majority, nor reduced income poverty. On optimistic official estimates, rural poverty fell from 50.1% in 1993-94 to 41.8% in 2004-05, and in cities, from 32.6% to 25.7%. These numbers are considered far too low by many capable economists. But even assuming they're correct, the poverty decline was modest. It still leaves nearly 400 million Indians living at or below an animal level of subsistence, consuming fewer calories than needed to keep body and soul together. So, at the end of the two highest-growth decades in recent history, India still has the highest number of dirt-poor people of any country in the world.

These numbers hide non-income forms of poverty and deprivation, including dispossession from land, ecological destruction, widespread malnutrition, social bondage, gender-related poverty, compulsion to drink unsafe water and live in unhygienic conditions, etc.”

 

With the ushering in of neoliberalism in India (beginning from 1980s and intensified post 1990s) the erstwhile state-owned institutions started getting privatised. For the working class, this involved an assault on their basic safety nets including minimum wages, work hours, overtime pay, cost of living adjustments, occupational safety, job security, organizing and collective bargaining rights.

 

Snehal Shinghavi writes^[4]:

“In fact, the only way to understand the history of neoliberalism in India and the current crisis that Indian capital faces is to understand the last forty years as a systematic attempt to reorganize the labor process to benefit Indian capital.”

 

The rise of AAP took place at a time when people of India were faced with huge income inequality and dispossession of people from livelihood while corporate-favourites to the rulers were allowed to freely loot the country’s resources.

 

It is true that several of the policies implemented by the AAP led Delhi government have gained popularity among the people. However, a look at the situation of livelihood and rights of the working people of Delhi under AAP government would give us clearer perspective of political-ideological location of the AAP.

 

AAP and the Working Class

 

The COVID-19 pandemic and its mismanagement has fatally harmed workers across the world. In India, this was coupled with an injudiciously imposed lockdown, with barely any assistance and aid given to workers at this moment of crisis. The AAP government in Delhi fared no better. Millions of workers, which includes migrant workers, who were hired on contractual basis were fired at the start of the pandemic. The failure of the Public Distribution System in Delhi left the workers without any proper food and nutrition. A fancy e-coupon system for rationing food was announced in Delhi, but it remained inaccessible to the majority. It must also be noted that only 37% of the population of Delhi had ration cards (which are necessary to avail rations) at the time. The period of the pandemic only exposed the terrible conditions of labor that were lingering on for years and were being ignored or suppressed by the AAP government. 

 

Workers of Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC), which is an important feature of Delhi’s public transport system, broke out in massive protests in 2015. At least 12,000 DTC workers hired on contractual basis remain to be made permanent employees. The workers were politicized and conducted sit-in protests with their demands and broke out into a flash protest when a fellow driver (Ashok Kumar) was murdered in a road rage in Mundka while on duty. Without making any attempts to negotiate with the workers, the AAP invoked the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) to suppress the protests. This law has been used countless times by the AAP, recently to suppress the protests of Anganwadi workers.

 

The Anganwadi workers of Delhi who work as the backbone of the city’s maternal welfare and childcare have been on strike since January 2022, demanding better pay, regularized work, and recognition as government employees rather than volunteers. In 2017, the AAP government had promised to add Rs. 500/- to the remuneration of Anganwadi workers (and Rs. 250/- for helpers) as internet allowance. Workers claim that this was soon reduced to Rs. 200/- and never paid.

 

The Mohalla clinic, as mentioned earlier, is one of the main focal points of the AAP model of governance. These institutions don’t aim to challenge the sway of privatized healthcare, either implicitly or explicitly. The Mohalla Clinics create an alternate platform that provides some basic amenities at lower costs but cannot be seen as a long-term solution. It is also important to note that the doctors are hired in these clinics on a contractual basis without any fixed salary. They are paid Rs. 40 per patient seen, resulting in a monthly income that is far less than a government employee. While pharmacists and multitask, workers do have fixed salaries, they are denied leave provisions.

 

Where do we go from here?

 

The AAP has been consistently trying to be a beneficiary of the Hindutva centric paradigm of politics normalised by the BJP-RSS in today’s India. In no way has it ever attempted to defend secularism and rights of the minorities when it was most needed. Be it adding to Islamophobic propaganda driven by fake news during Covid peak about Nizamuddin Markaz and terming Jahangir Puri demolition victims as illegal encroachers or the AAP’s inaction to stop the Delhi anti-Muslim violence in February 2020, its alliance vis-a-vis the communalism-secularism conflict is becoming clearer every day. Meanwhile, the working class in AAP-governed Delhi, which includes workers from both the formal and informal sectors, continues to be exploited. In their daily struggles for survival, they do not receive any assistance from the AAP government. Labor demands continue to remain unmet, and labour protests are vehemently suppressed by employing draconian laws such as the ESMA (Essential Services Maintenance Act.)

 

This has important lessons for the labour movement, which includes communist parties, their affiliate trade unions and a significant number of independent trade unions which organize the urban workers across various sectors and occupations. 

 

There is some merit in the argument that the overwhelming majority of votes that the AAP received in the 2020 Delhi Legislative Assembly Elections, has temporarily kept the fascist BJP at bay. But it is important to remember that this relief is only temporary and patently weak. Meanwhile, much of the communal rhetoric, characteristic of the BJP and the RSS, has been co-opted by the AAP. That the AAP appears as a legitimate alternative, points towards the challenges the communists have at hand.  Raju J Das writes in his book^[5]:

 

“An important question to ask is: while BJP was kept at bay, what was done to raise class consciousness of the masses and to mobilize them independently of bourgeois formations, in the sphere outside Parliament?”