Buoyed by its stupendous performance in the recent elections to the Punjab Assembly, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) decided while it was time for its government in the state to hit the ground running without delay, the party announced its intention to expand its political space in other parts.

Earlier this week, AAP identified the party will strengthen its organisation in the states of Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Telangana and Kerala and tasked a senior member to start tilling the field.

Now, the selection of states is logical since from the end of this year towards the end of 2023, people of seven states will be electing a new government and AAP hopes to offer to the electorate a viable alternative.

This is not the first time the party established on October 2, 2012 decided to flap its wings to soar higher. Riding into office on the crest of its ‘anti-corruption’ plank in Delhi in 2013, a year after its spectacular debut, the party contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections across the length and breadth of the country.

It fielded 432 candidates including its national convener Arvind Kejriwal, who contested against Narendra Modi in Varanasi. The end results was the party won four seats in the Lok Sabha and all of them from Punjab with an overall vote share of a shade over two percent. In the last general elections, AAP contested 35 seats with Bhagwant Mann as its lone winner. Mann retained his Sangrur Lok Sabha seat, which he quit last week after election as the Chief Minister of Punjab.

The AAP began testing political waters in different assembly elections since 2017 and till 2022, the party contested 1,423 assembly seats across seats of Gujarat, Goa, Punjab, Telengana, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Odisha, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Uttrakhand and Uttar Pradesh. Of these it won 20 in Punjab in 2017 and 92 this year along with two seats in Goa assembly and barring these two states, the party vote share did not even touch one percent.

Challenges in each of the states including the two in southern India that AAP announced coordinators are diverse as is the political terrain. Except in Telangana and Kerala, in rest of the states the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress have been dominating the political space, with either party being given the reins of governance over the last few decades. After its successful experiment in Punjab, where AAP worked as the principal party in the opposition before storming into office this month, the party should be attempting to create a stronger base.

Himachal Pradesh will offer the first base away from home for AAP to insert itself in the electoral battle where the Congress is hoping to mount a challenge to the BJP, in government for the last five years. A state, one part of undivided Punjab like its neighbour voted one or the other party in and out of the government. However, this time around the Congress will be without its senior most and influential leader Virdbhara Singh, who was acceptable across both Upper and Lower regions of the State. Recently, his widow Pratibha Singh was elected from Mandi Lok Sabha seat in 2021 bypoll, a result interpreted as a setback to Chief Minister Jairam Thakur. AAP would contest all the 68 seats and gave responsibility to Delhi Minister Satyendra Jain as incharge of the state along with Durgesh Pathak.

Will the party be able to offer the Delhi-model of governance to the people of this Hill state? That is a sample that AAP pitchforked in Punjab but by the time HP votes, the electorate here would start looking at what is happening in neighbouring state with contiguous areas. Bhagwant Mann and his government should be under scrutiny soon not just from people of Punjab but Himachal Pradesh too.

Gujarat is another key state the AAP decided to raise the stakes. According to the announcement, the party entrusted its in-house strategist Sandeep Pathak to craft a winning plan. Pathak was credited with having drawn out an elaborate roadmap in Punjab and the behind-the-scenes IIT academic was rewarded with a Rajya Sabha seat.

The electoral test in Gujarat is going to be far tougher simply because in the last two decades, the BJP developed firm roots in the state. The Congress, which offered resistance, has been unable to regain the reins of government and the AAP’s token contest in 29 of the 182-strong assembly last time came a cropper.

Since 2002, the BJP under then Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have turned the party into a strong political force and concedes little space to political opponents. Yet, in the last elections, the Congress mounted a spirited challenge to win 77 seats, the highest in the last three decades but not enough to prevent the BJP getting a simple majority. Does this matrix offer a chink for the AAP to explore? Politics, as it is said, is the art of possible.

— KV Prasad is a senior journalist and has earlier worked with The Hindu and The Tribune. The views expressed are personal.

Read his other columns here

(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)