Tag Archives: South Asia

India Votes against Corruption, But Not for Its Anti-Corruption Party

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For perhaps the first time, Indians set aside community and religious divisions to vote against an incumbent government perceived to be corrupt. Nevertheless, the country’s new anti-corruption party performed poorly in this month’s national elections, picking up only four of the five hundred and forty-five seats in the lower house of parliament.

I have written about the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a political outfit borne out of anticorruption protests, here. I recently expressed hope that the urban, middle-class party would be able to encourage rural, low-income Indians to vote against corruption, rather than along community or religious lines.

I was partly right–but only partly. India’s vast electorate handed a resounding defeat to the corruption-plagued Congress party. Congress—the party that led India’s independence movement and has ruled the country for most of the past sixty years—won only forty-four seats, its worst showing ever. This would not have been possible if India’s voters had ignored issues like corruption and good governance.

However, AAP was unable to take advantage of this anticorruption sentiment. There are two major reasons for this. Continue reading →

Will Corruption Matter to India’s Low-Income Voters?

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As India’s new anti-corruption Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party (AAP) jostles for votes in India’s ongoing (six-week long!) national elections, it must figure out a way to challenge entrenched voting habits and engage with low-income voters on the issue of corruption. The AAP has been described (and sometimes dismissed) as a middle-class phenomenon–a political upstart that will have difficulty connecting with the country’s many low-income voters, who have long been expected to vote along community lines. But this dismissive attitude–and the idea that anticorruption is predominantly a middle-class concern–may not be justified. In fact, the evidence seems to suggest that an anticorruption message is particularly likely to resonate with poorer voters.

Continue reading →

Lessons from Europe for India’s Anticorruption Party

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Last December, a year-old political party formed by anticorruption activists came to power in India’s capital, after a startling debut performance in Delhi’s local assembly elections. Within days, the new government, led by a former tax man named Arvind Kejriwal, announced a series of anti-graft investigations. Only 49 days into its term, however, Kejriwal and his colleagues resigned, ostensibly because their minority government could not push through an anticorruption bill. The party now has its eyes set on India’s parliamentary elections, set to occur this May.

Much has been written about India’s mercurial Aam Aadmi (“Common Man”) Party (AAP): its origins, its dedicated volunteers, its transparent campaign finance procedures, its vague policies regarding anything but corruption, and its missteps (some of which Russel Stamets discusses in a useful recent post on the FCPA Blog). Despite this, there has been little discussion regarding AAP’s place as a single-issue party in India’s deeply fractured political landscape, and little attempt to draw lessons from the successes and failures of anticorruption parties in other parts of the world.  Yet the experience of anticorruption parties in Central and Eastern Europe–as documented and analyzed by Andreas Bågenholm –offers both hope and important lessons to AAP and its supporters. Continue reading →