A former tax inspector who leads a new populist political party dedicated to improving the lot of the "Common Man" is to take over the government of India's sprawling and troubled capital city, Delhi.
The Aam Aadmi (Common Man) party stunned political analysts and established parties when it won 28 out of 70 seats in local assembly elections in Delhi this month. Later this week, its convener, Arvind Kejriwal, will be sworn in as chief minister of the city of 15 million people.
Kejriwal, 45, beat the former chief minister of the city, a veteran of the ruling Congress party who had dismissed the AAP's challenge as "not even on our radar" when it was founded a year ago. Congress was wiped out in the poll, reduced to eight seats.
Almost all of the candidates of the AAP were political novices, including a rickshaw driver, a lawyer and a TV actor. Their key pledge was to clean up politics and the endemic graft that has crippled the provision of public service for the many millions who cannot afford to pay for private healthcare, schooling or basics such as water.
The party's message and symbol – a broom – proved popular with urban voters also struggling with runaway inflation, chronic youth underemployment and slowing economic growth.
Kerjiwal, who called the party's victory a "historic win," said initially he would not form a minority government. But after lengthy negotiations in recent days, the Congress party decided to support the AAP in the Delhi local assembly. "It's a great day, a very exciting time," said Aathishi Marlena, a senior AAP activist and policy adviser.
Marlena said the challenges were daunting but that the party would meet them. "Tackling the rampant corruption, the lack of transparency and accountability, the problems faced by the common people is a matter of political will and that's what we bring to this," Marlena said.
The main opposition Bharatiya Janata (BJP) party won 32 seats but no other political group was willing to offer it support.
Sachin Pilot, a Congress minister, described the emergence of the AAP in Delhi as "absolutely astonishing." He said: "For my party of course it has been a setback but generally speaking the fact that individuals can come together in a very difficult space and find themselves relevant and meaningful has been a new phenomenon. In the past three or four decades it hasn't happened at all. That's something one has to recognize, reconcile and then deal with."
Senior Congress officials said the party's support for the AAP would not be unconditional and would depend on its performance.
Though India's population remains largely rural, the proportion of seats in the national assembly determined by urban voters has steadily risen in recent years. Some analysts see the new middle classes in cities and, particularly, tens of thousands of small towns as determining what is likely to be a tough battle between the Congress party and the BJP in national polls next spring. Also likely to crucial are between 120 million and 150 million first-time voters.
The AAP has said it now wants to focus efforts on expanding into the huge northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of 180 million, and Bihar, another poor northern state. It hopes eventually to become a national party.
Kejriwal's announcement ended two weeks of speculation and fears of a hung assembly in Delhi, a city that has become richer in recent years but has huge problems of crime, sanitation, housing and pollution.
Though the outgoing Congress government in Delhi had been praised for successfully building a metro system and holding the Commonwealth Games in the Indian capital in 2010, it had also been hit by graft charges and suffered from the general unpopularity of the Congress-led coalition government at a national level.
The new government will be sworn in on Thursday. The BJP called the AAP's decision a betrayal. "The AAP accused the Congress of being the most corrupt. Today they have compromised on their principles. This is gross betrayal," said Harsh Vardhan, the BJP's chief ministerial candidate.
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