Abstract
The Aam Admi Party (AAP; Party of the Common Man) was founded as the political outcome of an anti-corruption movement in India that lasted for 18 months between 2010–2012. The anti-corruption movement, better known as the India Against Corruption Movement (IAC), demanded the passage of the <em>Janlokpal </em>Act<em>, </em>an Ombudsman body. The movement mobilized public opinion against corruption and the need for the passage of a law to address its rising incidence. The claim to eradicate corruption captured the imagination of the middle class, and threw up several questions of representation. The movement prompted public and media debates over who represented civil society, who could claim to represent the ‘people’, and asked whether parliamentary democracy was a more authentic representative of the people’s wishes vis-à-vis a people’s democracy where people expressed their opinion through direct action. This article traces various ideas of political representation within the IAC that preceded the formation of the AAP to reveal the emergence of populist representative democracy in India. It reveals the dynamic relationship forged by the movement with the media, which created a political field that challenged liberal democratic principles and legitimized popular public perception and opinion over laws and institutions.
Highlights
There has been a lot of interest in understanding new ways of ‘doing politics’ in India
The formation of the government in Delhi1 by the Aam Admi Party (AAP; Party of the Common Man) and the rise of its leader Arvind Kejriwal in the 2013 and 2015 state elections is been argued to be another critical milestone in Indian democratic politics (Jayal, 2016; Roy, 2014)
The AAP was founded as the political outcome of the India Against Corruption Movement (IAC), known as the Janlokpal Movement that lasted for 18 months from 2010 to 2012
Summary
There has been a lot of interest in understanding new ways of ‘doing politics’ in India. The formation of the government in Delhi by the Aam Admi Party (AAP; Party of the Common Man) and the rise of its leader Arvind Kejriwal in the 2013 and 2015 state elections is been argued to be another critical milestone in Indian democratic politics (Jayal, 2016; Roy, 2014). This party, as Stephanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (2019) mentions, claimed to have entered politics to “clean it [politics] from inside”, to “change the rules” and to “make politics more honest”. That the media played a crucial role in driving this change
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