Arvind Kejriwal, middle, of the Common Man Party,at a rally in Delhi, India, April 4, 2014. While Kejriwal has won support for his anti-corruption platform, his decision to step down early from a regional post to compete in India’s nation-wide elections may have been a losing gamble.DANIEL BEREHULAK/The New York Times
Everyone knew Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were going to triumph in India's pivotal national elections. The only question was by how much. Likewise, everyone knew the incumbent Indian National Congress Party was going to get trounced – and again, the question was simply by how much.
The real wild card in India's marathon, five-week general election was the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party (AAP), a fiery group of populists that grew out of India's anti-corruption movement.
In December of 2013, the newly formed party swept to power in New Delhi's state elections, winning 28 seats out of 70 after being underestimated by almost everyone on the subcontinent. Their leader Arvind Kejriwal, a mustachioed former tax collector, became the chief minister of India's national capital region and promptly slashed electricity prices, trucked free water into the slums and became incredibly popular among Delhi's urban poor.
After 49 days in power, Mr. Kejriwal quit as chief minister – partly because his long-promised anti-corruption bill was stalled in the legislature, but also because he desperately wanted to seize on his party's momentum and run in the general elections. And so the Common Man Party began an unlikely campaign to take its anti-corruption message (and their populist policies) national.
It was a remarkable roll of the dice, and many in India were anxiously awaiting the result. Would they be underestimated again, and gain enough power to influence not just New Delhi but all of India?
Everyone found out on Friday, when the votes were tallied: The AAP had gambled and lost.
Of 543 constituencies across India, AAP got only 4 seats – all of them in the Sikh heartland of Punjab. They didn't win any of Delhi's seven seats in the Lok Sabha, or lower house, all of which went to the BJP. They didn't win a single seat anywhere else – in any of the urban slums of Calcutta or Mumbai or any of India's other big cities, where the impoverished could only dream of receiving the types of policies that had directly impacted the poor in New Delhi. Nationally, the BJP got 282 seats and Congress saw their worst defeat since independence, winning just 44 seats.
So what went wrong for AAP?
When I was reporting on the elections in April, almost everyone I spoke to in New Delhi's poorer neighbourhoods said they planned to vote for AAP – a party that backed up the pro-poor rhetoric of India's politicians with policies that actually put money back in poor peoples' pockets and eased the crushing burden of India's rampant inflation.
Many were originally hopeful when Mr. Kejriwal quit his Delhi assembly post to run nationally – seeing hope that he and his band of corruption fighters might be able to radically change India's political status quo, where corrupt politicians (almost a third of whom have outstanding criminal cases against them) pocketed money and bickered while much of the country's population of 1.2 billion was mired in poverty.
But clearly, more Indians shared the view of Tanveen Ratti, a young, middle-class product designer I met in New Delhi. "I will probably vote for Modi, but my heart is with AAP," she told me in a lounge in one of New Delhi's upscale neighbourhoods. "The country now needs a stable government. Modi can give us that. AAP can't."
For her and many others, Mr. Kejriwal's big bet looked more like an indication of instability to come – a frightening prospect after years of corruption scandals and policy paralysis at the central government level. With the Indian economy slowing down, people seemed to crave the type of stable, authoritative leadership Mr. Modi had shown over 12 long years as the chief minister of Gujarat, a well-off western state. Even if critics pointed to communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims and deteriorating social metrics in Gujarat during his reign, the BJP's sophisticated messaging emphasized that it was not time for more corruption (with Congress) or more instability (with AAP).
AAP supporters may disagree with that analysis, but Mr. Kejriwal and his advisers have realized that quitting early was the main reason for their poor showing.
They and their numerous overseas supporters will rightly point out that AAP was transparent about financial donations, posting them all on a party website, while other bigger parties dipped into so-called "black money" sources – bribes and off-the-book political donations. They might also point out that they were waging a guerrilla campaign from the very beginning with very few (if any) paid staff and an army of passionate volunteers who simply wanted to make India a better place. Running a campaign in hundreds of constituencies is no easy feat; doing so from scratch may always have been impossible.
But AAP, for a time, helped energize Indian politics. The party may have won only at the state level last year, but its presence in the capital, its captivating rags-to-riches narrative and the fact that it was explicitly against corruption – a daily fact of life for many in India, rich or poor – had given it an outsized influence on the national debate. That influence may not fade.
And it is unlikely to drift away entirely, even as it struggles to refocus at the state level in the wake of its stunning defeat nationally. India was a richer country with AAP as part of the political discourse. And even though the country is now the BJP's to shape at will, since it has a clear majority, AAP supporters can only now hope that the party's rebuke at the polls – like the monumental defeat handed to the Congress party – may help AAP, over the long term, rebuild and mature as an organization.