‘Upper middle class is also responding to issues’
Activist-turned-politician is confident AAP will make its presence felt
“The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will have a sizeable number of members of Parliament in the 16th Lok Sabha to make a difference to what happens there, our target is the highest possible number of MPs,” said Medha Patkar, well-known social activist and AAP candidate from Mumbai North East.
Patkar spoke to a group of HT’s editors as part of your newspaper’s electionrelated initiative, HT Unplugged.
Patkar said she was focussing on “a low-key campaign” to reach out to her electorate that comprised the city’s largest slums and upper-middle class apartments. “The election expenditure is mind-boggling, the caste permutations and combinations are beyond me. I focus on issues and I believe people are responding, even in upper-middle class societies,” she said.
Patkar faces Sanjay Dina Patil, sitting MP of the Nationalist Congress Party, and Kirit Somaiya of the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance. Patil had won with a slender margin of 2,933 votes.
“Ideally, there should not be a place for identity-based politics such as minority and Dalit politics, but these are real issues and change will happen slowly. We can see that BJP’s Narendra Modi has moved from ‘Namo Namo to Vajpayee, corruption and other issues’.
We can’t ignore caste, class and gender issues, but we have to work to go beyond them and turn them irrelevant,” Patkar said.
Speaking about Arvind Kejriwal’s resignation as Delhi chief minister, Patkar said, “I was coming down the Satpuras when I heard this. I sent him an SMS asking him to stick on, but it’s true that he wouldn’t have been able to function after that. It’s not about morality or principles alone, it’s also strategic. In politics, decisions have to be taken very fast.”
Patkar argued that the AAP ideology was not selfcontradictory or confused. “Ideology is a set of norms and beliefs. It’s not something only utopian,” she said.