AAPraisal

It is appraisal time across companies, so I thought of doing one myself for AAP. I call it AAPraisal!

India’s population can be divided in three categories when it comes to AAP: One that supports AAP, second one that does not support AAP and the third one that used to support AAP when it made its debut in Delhi but lost faith afterwards. I fall into the third category. It was really nice to see a party come out of nowhere to try and make a positive difference to people’s lives. It was almost like witnessing a revolution. I would have ideally liked AAP to start on a small scale (Delhi was the perfect launch pad) and then graduate to national level. Being a conservative investor myself, I prefer a fixed return scheme over some risky instrument giving high returns and a better part of India also thinks on the same lines I guess. If you draw parallels with AAP, I was hoping after winning Delhi, they would take it easy and consistently grow like a fixed return scheme over a long period of time. But now I get a feeling that it was almost like winning a lottery! They won the lottery in the form of Delhi, became big overnight and lost everything in 49 days! They got too big for themselves. Clean slate and a uniting factor like ‘fight for a corruption free government’ worked in their favor to start with but trying to solve every problem on earth in their own unique manner and that too quickly failed them. After winning and then leaving Delhi in no time they decided to focus on general elections. It was more than disappointing for the people of Delhi who voted a new party like theirs to power hoping for a better government only to be left without government after 49 days.

With the Delhi fiasco to their credit (or discredit), the slate was not clean anymore. Now the destination was national elections. To attract attention statements were made against other parties, AK decided to fight the election himself from the same place where a national party’s prime ministerial candidate was contesting. They campaigned aggressively with people from all walks of life coming to support in their own capacity. Result: they could only win four seats! Even shocking was the fact that they did not win a single seat in their home ground Delhi! It was an outright rejection of a party which had just won the assembly elections in Delhi and hearts across India. Like their way of working, their results have also been quite extreme and all this happened in hardly few months’ time. Now they again plan to go to Delhi’s voters apologizing for exiting suddenly and requesting another mandate to come to power. It will be interesting to see Delhi’s response to their request and whether they will manage to comeback to power again. We will know soon if the saying ‘Subah ka bhoola shyam ko ghar aaye to use bhula nhi khete’ actually applies in politics!