Crisis In The AAP Casts Shadows On Civil-Society Meet On Alternative Politics
By Abhay Kumar
17 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org
New Delhi: March 17, 2015: The crisis in the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) cast its shadow on a panel discussion on ‘alternative politics’ held in Press Club on Wednesday.
The discussion, jointly organised by Press Club of India and Media Studies Group, New Delhi, was attended by a number of civil society members, including senior journalists, academics, lawyers etc.
Linking the current contestation in the AAP to its inability to take a firm stance on secularism, senior advocate and president of PUCL (Delhi), N. D. Pancholi pulled up AAP for raising the “divisive” slogan of Vandre Matram, which, in his view, had a major contribution to the partition of the country. ‘Vande Matram creates suspicion among Muslims,’ Pancholi contended.
Outlining his notion of alternative politics, Pancholi said that such politics should not run after power, rather it should expose the vested interests. Contrary to this, the AAP, as he claimed, forged an alliance for power. For him, this happened because the AAP does not have any “ideology” (vichar).
Commenting on the current struggle in the AAP, Manindra Nath Thakur, who teaches at Centre for Political Studies, JNU, said that the AAP had been plugged by an environment of “total distrust”. Thus, the AAP had become “the party of sting operation” in which the party leaders had done a “sting operation” on its own supreme leader.
Doling out a piece of advice to the AAP, Thakur asserted, ‘Trust and not distrust should be organising principle’.
Alluding to consolidation of right-wing forces in the AAP, senior journalist and author Anil Chamadia said that it was very unfortunate that some of the genuine concerns of AAP leader Prashant Bhushan had been dismissed by calling him an “ultra-Leftist”.
Professor of economics at JNU, Arun Kumar too criticized the AAP for shying away from discussing alternative economic policy because the party feared that such policy may “alienate” its middle and upper-middle class social base.
On the occasion, Nandita Narain, president of Delhi University’s Teachers Association (DUTA), recognized that corruption was an “issue”, conceding that even the Left parties were not free from corruption and bureaucracy (afsarsahi).
Prominent among those who also spoke included Professor Rizwan Kaisar, Jamia Millia Islamia, Jaspal Singh Sidhu, senior journalist, Phoolchand Singh, Nadeem Ahmad Kazmi, general secretary of Press Club of India.
(Abhay Kumar is pursuing PhD at Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi.)
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