NOT AFRAID: Shazia Ilmi, the Aam Aadmi Party candidate for RK Puram constituency in Delhi, during a public meeting in a slum. To make Ilmi pull out from state elections, rival parties have been regularly threatening her team and slum residents
Readers of this newspaper are presumably English-speaking, middle-class, urbane Nepalis. Like their counterparts in India, they too wish the two M’s (muscle and money) will not affect elections. And yet they are averse to wading into the muck of the political arena.
Defying this perception of politics is India’s
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which has metamorphosed from being a band of civil activists into a political outfit and plunged into the Delhi State Assembly election, due on 4 December. Its principal founders are middle-class, have no prior experience of contesting elections, and their initial agenda was to cleanse the country of corruption. Subsequently, their agenda and support base includes the underclass of India’s vast federal capital.
As Nepal prepares for its own elections in November, there may be lessons from an AAP candidate who is middle-class, a media person, and has had no prior experience in politics. TV anchor Shazia Ilmi is contesting from the high-profile RK Puram constituency, which is a medley of posh colonies, residential blocs of bureaucrats, and slums. It was in this constituency that the 23-year-old physiotherapist was raped last December, provoking apathetic Delhi-ites to pour out on the streets in protest. It was also here that some of the rapists worked and lived.
When the AAP declared it was fielding Ilmi from RK Puram, she found access to some slum-clusters denied to her team. In those locales where they held a gathering or showed a film on the electricity scam in the city, she said cops would arrive demanding to know whether or not they had taken permission from the authorities. “This was when no such prior permission was required,” Ilmi told me.
To compel her team into submission, a car full of boys would arrive at her public meetings, then another, soon a third, all of them shouting and abusing the AAP activists. The AAP team gamely carried on until some of its members were roughed up.
“We made a complaint to the police, not that we wanted protection, but to ensure nobody was beaten up,” Ilmi said. Perhaps the rivals of AAP wouldn’t have dared to resort to violence against her, as she is a readably recognisable TV face and RK Puram isn’t outside the arc of media coverage.
Since such tactics didn’t dissuade Ilmi and her team to pull out, the rivals took recourse to intimidating the residents of slums. Those who attended their rallies or helped them were later warned that they wouldn’t be provided cards allowing them access to subsidised government services or gas connections.
“It is as if people in slums are being watched all the time,” Ilmi said. “For a third party, for a new entrant, things are very, very tough.”
In posh colonies, Ilmi has found voters are cynical, argue a lot, and ask questions on water-harvesting and about India’s image abroad. Some of them are even bothered about the quality of her pamphlets. Their worry is not the price of water and electricity, but the belief that the AAP, if voted to power, would reverse the privatisation of utilities and disrupt the regular supply they enjoy, albeit at a high price.
The best response Ilmi elicits is from colonies of bureaucrats, adequately informed of the issues in the election and the positions the contending parties have taken on them. What distinguishes middle-class voters from the ones in the slum is the degree of desperation. Next to the posh colonies in India’s capital, Ilmi finds people in slums have to spend four hours a day to get water.
Those in slums constitute around 35 per cent of the electorate in her constituency. Political parties seek to control their votes because they traditionally turn out in large numbers on polling day – almost 70 per cent. By contrast, posh areas register just 10 to 20 per cent and government colonies anywhere between 30 to 40 per cent.
Nepalis, as also Indians, should know: cynicism doesn’t lead to change. That is why every ballot is valuable. Ilmi’s strategy is clear, she says: “Our challenge is to get the first-time voter, the non-voter, and the cynical voter to come out on polling day.”
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