Could Arvind Kejriwal be the political equivalent of the wristy Karnataka genius? This analogy has been referenced repeatedly in my presence by armchair politicians discussing the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP's) electoral debut.
Is the AAP's success sustainable? It is not only sustainable, it's scalable. The AAP, or some successor with similar methods, will be a major and growing force over the next 20 years. It can afford to wait since its leaders are considerably younger than their opposite numbers. In the shorter term too, the AAP may be a serious contender.
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Consider demographics. The AAP appeals to middle-income and lower-income groups with urban concerns, and that vote bank is growing. The census reclassifies a village as a "census town" if it has at least 5,000 inhabitants, a density of 400 people per square kilometre, and at least 75 per cent of the male labour force is "engaged in non-agricultural pursuits". The 2011 census recorded some 2,500 new census towns.
There's also massive migration into cities. Projections by the Planning Commission suggest that 40 per cent of the population will be urban by 2030. As of now, the urban population is estimated at about 290 million and expected to hit 600 million by 2030. This is probably an underestimate. Individuals who work in a city 11 months of the year and retain voter ID in their home villages are classified as rural residents. India may be urbanising even faster than estimated.
A large segment consists of people with earnings distributed from just above-poverty level to below high income. This is the AAP's target audience. Let's avoid debates about where the poverty line should be drawn. Everyone - and all the data - agrees that there have been gains at the lower end.
This population is young. It's aspirational. It resents constant petty harassment from low-level bureaucracy. It suffers the vagaries of poor urban services. It is unhappy with mainstream politicians.
It is better educated than any prior generation (without being well educated). It has greater comfort with technology. It is reached easily via social media. Cell phone penetration is 100 per cent. This demographic accesses news online and has strong opinions, as anybody tracking feedback on vernacular news sites knows.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has, in its time, derived much support from this demographic. But the BSP is self-limited by caste, and it's also seen as cynical and corrupt. In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party (SP) also targets some of the same groups, though the SP has negligible presence in the NCR. The SP too has language, image and caste limitations.
The AAP has transcended those barriers for the time being, at least. In the 2013 Delhi Assembly elections, the BSP's vote share declined to 5.4 per cent from above 14 per cent in 2008 and the AAP took that nine per cent. It also grabbed vote share off both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. It could conceivably eat the SP's lunch as well.
This is where the equation may work, short-term. The BSP and the Congress together hold a lot of vote share in many urban North Indian constituencies across Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. The SP holds a chunk in many of the same places as well. If the AAP runs targeted campaigns - and it has demonstrated the ability to do that - it could pick up some Lok Sabha seats outside of Delhi.
The acid test will come as and when the AAP ends up in power somewhere. It may not be able to deliver to anywhere near expectations. The clean image could also take a knock once it has access to the feeding trough. But in the long run, the demographics will skew more in its favour. Net-net, it may have more going for it, circa 2023 or 2028, than either of the national parties.