Main aur AAP

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often - Winston Churchill

As the broad contours of this post crystallised in my head this evening, I grew determined to write about what a wonderful thing change is, and why we all need to support it. Then, I went back a couple of years, when I was in second year of college, when Vedant told me very animatedly about his Students' Union campaign speech. He said that he was surprised that he could make a statement like "Kakati represents change, and change is good." He seemed, then, to wonder why people would accept that statement (the second part of it) without any protests. Let me park this thought here.

It has been a very long year for anybody who has ever been a supporter of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The time during the Delhi elections was the high tide of our enthusiasm, when it seemed that we could set the world right just by pressing the 'jhadu' button on the EVM. It seemed like the politics of this country was going to change, that governance and public accountability would get a new definition and that the tyranny of the ruling classes would end. Over six months down the line, that hope has evaporated. Several people who were associated with the movement have grown disillusioned and left. Not without reason! The party has, at several stages, made it difficult for us, the silent supporters, to justify their actions. It was difficult enough to justify the resignation from the government, when the perplexing recommendation to the Lt. Governor to not dissolve the house surfaced after the Lok Sabha results. Part of this would be media mis-interpretation (as has often been the case with the AAP), but it was enough to make people believe that we made a mistake.

Let me again park this though here, and move back a couple of years to my college life. Quite in contrast to how I feel about things now (someone recently told me I had a mahatma kind of demeanour), I would be very aggressive about my view points, and my perception of what is right and wrong. I was much like what the AAP now is - with a clear conscience, but with very little understanding and tact. I would often rub people the wrong way (I remember once, when a senior questioned me about a mock stocks model I made, I told him that he first needed to know a bit of finance to understand it). I spent nearly a year in this 'activist' mode, shielding and encouraging those who I perceived as being wronged, and being very aggressive with those who I saw as perpetrators of a legacy of racial and nepotistic favours. It all came to a rather violent end, and since then life has become less about standing up, and more about accommodating.

Now that I think of it - would my life today be richer if I did not make those 'mistakes'? I do not think so. Those 'mistakes' was as much part of the 'change' that I was trying to bring about as anything else. I was trying to bring about a system where mistakes were considered less of a crime than malfeasance. I strongly believed, and still do, that as long as the heart is in the right place, mistakes should be condoned. Change is a delicate object, and we need all our patience and all our will to see it through.

Coming back, why would the same principle not apply to the AAP? Of course they have made mistakes! Does that mean they are unfit to govern us? I do not think so. As long as the heart (i.e. participatory democracy) is in the right place, we will always find a way. I needed my shock three years back to become a new and improved person, and the AAP is going through convulsions of its own. Shazia Ilmi's resignation has been (thus far) the nadir of this downturn, and it made me write an email to her. She replied, reaffirming her commitment to doing the 'right thing always' and saying that together, we should all make India a better place. It was reassuring to know that we, with all our differences, are hoping for the same thing - a better India, a happier life for its citizens.

I would end by saying that change is at best the panacea to our present woes, and at worst a 'disruptive agent' that will keep the status quo on tenterhooks. I feel that we in India tend to question change more than we question the status quo - this is our famous 'chalta hai' attitude. I looked back into my past, and I found that for me to be a 'holistic individual', who applies the same principles to his social life as to his individual life, I need to support the AAP for as long as I can (till the time that their heart is in the right place). If at this moment, I turn my back on the party and the movement, it is a betrayal of that spirit of change and innovation that, in one college society, helped me become the person I am, and in another, saw me destroy myself in the singular aim to achieve it.