After the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP’s) humongous victory in Delhi, where it won over 54 percent of the popular vote and 67 of the 70 assembly seats, one can read too much – or too little – into it.

The mistake is to assume that AAP’s rise is a foregone conclusion. This is, by no means, certain, for a lot will depend on what it delivers in Delhi itself and how it manages perceptions. It is not easy to meet great expectations – as Narendra Modi is finding out, too. If AAP does well, its appeal will be magnified elsewhere. If it falters, its mistakes will also be magnified – as was the case with Arvind Kejriwal’s 49-day government.

Victory in Delhi gives AAP the brand equity to build itself in other states, as eager, young voters get attracted to a potential winner. If AAP had won, say, in Punjab, it would not have been seen as a big challenger to the BJP and Modi. In Delhi, AAP is a potent threat. In the sense of public perceptions and the national media, it is already a national phenomenon.

In some ways, Kejriwal’s victory is not dissimilar to Narendra Modi’s in 2014 – a victory for optimism and aspirational politics over the old politics of caste, community and negativism.

This does not mean caste, religion and class will not matter in other states, but all parties will now seek to reconfigure themselves to meet the new challenges. AAP and BJP have first-mover advantages on this phenomenon, but other parties will seek to close the gap in the coming months.

The BJP got lucky in that it embraced Modi before the AAP phenomenon surfaced. It has at least started the process of meeting rising aspirations in some way. Consider where it would have been if BJP had been led by LK Advani or Sushma Swaraj or Arun Jaitley or Rajnath Singh or even Shiraj Singh Chauhan. None of them look like politicians for the AAP age, even given their local strengths. Only Modi fits the bill.

After AAP’s win, the BJP needs Modi even more than it did in 2014. He is their only hope. The Sangh’s loud-mouths now need to be reined in and asked to focus on their social agenda quietly without interfering with Modi’s economic and political agenda.

The regional parties will be happy that Modi’s bandwagon has been stopped in its tracks, but their joy will be short-lived. Despite support from Nitish Kumar and Mamata Banerjee, both anti-Modi leaders, Kejriwal’s victory is not theirs. In fact, it is the antithesis of their brand of politics. And, at the end of the day, the BJP is still the party with 32 percent of the Delhi vote. The Nitish Kumars and Mamatas made no difference to AAP.

If AAP does well in Delhi, it will actually turn out to be a bigger threat to them and the Congress. So schadenfreude over BJP’s defeat will not help them stay relevant.

Some regional leaders are getting the message. In Uttar Pradesh, after the Lok Sabha drubbing, Akhilesh Yadav has begun asserting himself with his party’s old thuggish leaders and recast himself as the youthful, development face – which was what he had set out to do in 2012. Mulayam Singh is history, but Akhilesh Yadav is not (at least, not yet). We don’t know if Mayawati is going to reinvent herself, but she should. Her party has received two drubbings in Delhi, in 2013 and 2015. Her Dalit base is slipping – moving to both BJP and AAP - everywhere. Her brand of politics is also losing out.

The problem for all the regional parties is that they look even more behind the times than Congress or BJP. Under Modi, BJP is at least attempting a reinvention. But this is not something one can say about single-leader regional parties thrown up after the Mandal and Ram Janmabhoomi agitations.

Consider Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, which is running the same goonda culture in West Bengal as the Left did in over 30 years of rule. The BJP is gaining there because it represents the new voter better than the Left or TMC.

In Bihar, Nitish Kumar is busy trying to grab power from his puppet who refused to remain one. His enemy-turned-ally, Lalu Prasad, is a convicted criminal. The BJP, if it does not try too many backroom manoeuvres, will be well-placed in the October elections.

In Tamil Nadu, the two Dravidian parties run populist regimes driven by freebies and personality cults. All Tamil parties, barring possibly the still small BJP, look the same: corrupt, caste-oriented, and thuggish. Once more, the BJP is the party to watch, though AAP will surely look for a base in the coming years.

In Punjab, the communal politics of the Akalis will certainly face an AAP challenge. The four Lok Sabha seats won by AAP in 2014 were all from Punjab. The BJP may ultimately be better off without the Akalis, but old alliances die hard.

In Maharashtra, AAP has a better future in the cities. This is a threat to the politics of the Shiv Sena and MNS, not to speak of the Maratha lobby in western Maharashtra. The BJP and AAP will be natural contenders for power in Maharashtra. The Sena’s best bet would be to merge with the BJP, or seek a secondary status permanently.

In Haryana, the BJP does not look like a modern force even after the recent win. In the next elections, AAP will probably be a factor – but that is far away right now. The winds in Punjab will flow to Haryana in due course.

In Kerala, we have competing forms of communal or class mobilisation. The UDF is a bunch of caste and communal parties led by the Congress (IUML, Kerala Congress, etc). The CPI(M) is a mix of Hindu underclass (Ezhavas) plus communal politics (the Left allies with Muslim radical outfits here), and runs a violent party machine.

In Andhra Pradesh, N Chandrababu Naidu is a modern leader, but his party is dependent on the Khammas for clout. In Telangana, the Telangana Rashtriya Samiti is busy trying to treat Andhra-based settlers as outsiders. Both BJP and AAP have potential in both states.

In the BJP-ruled states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, the two national parties still hold sway, but AAP has potential here too. The Congress is simply not up to the task of offering an opposition.

The bottomline is simple: at the end of the day, the Modi-led BJP has its core Hindu constituency, a Sangh cadre, and a development agenda to fall back upon. The regional parties are the ones who are mired in the past. They have nothing beyond one-man parties hiding behind the tired old slogan of secularism that is well past its sell-by date. They are on the wrong side of history.

Source: FP