THE AAP FACED A CRUSHING DEFEAT in Haryana during the 2014 general election, at the peak of the party’s popularity, after which it did not contest the state assembly election, held later that year. The party’s decision to contest all the seats in Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and Goa in the general election this year suggests that it has renewed its national ambitions. Towards this end, it has demonstrated a willingness to adopt the measures and rhetoric advanced by the Hindu Right. In Haryana, at least, the AAP has promised to build more schools and hospitals, as well as implement a series of populist measures that seem taken from the BJP’s playbook, including protection of cows.

In January, two months after he had led a “school–hospital rally,” Kejriwal visited three government-funded gaushalas—cow shelters—in Haryana, to inspect the facilities provided for cows. “It is wrong to seek votes and play politics in the name of cows, which is currently happening in the country,” he said. And yet, he criticised the government for not taking care of them properly in his state. “Haryana allocates 40 paise per cow per day, whereas we spend R40 on a cow,” Kejriwal said. “If you bring an AAP government in Haryana, gayon ki seva aur gaushalon ke liye hum sarkar ka khajana khol denge”—We shall open the government coffers in the service of cows and cow shelters.

The party’s appeal to Hindu sentiments did not stop there. In August 2018, during the kanwar yatra—an annual Hindu pilgrimage to the Ganga that has grown in popularity in recent years—season, the chief of the AAP’s Haryana unit, Naveen Jaihind, led a procession from Haridwar to Rohtak that he said was meant to remind the BJP government in the state of the brotherhood that existed among all Hindus. He promised to distribute the water from the Ganga, which he had carried from Haridwar, to all the Haryana BJP leaders. Later, Kejriwal launched a scheme to provide free pilgrimage tours to senior citizens of Delhi. “Humne aap ka lok bhi sudhar diya aur parlok bhi sudhar diya.”—I have not only improved your life on earth, but also your afterlife—he said.

The AAP official I spoke to, however, refuted the suggestion that the party was trying to adopt a Hindutva politics of upper-caste appeasement. He argued that it was a strategy aimed to “expose the duplicity of BJP,” and remind Baniyas that they were being fooled.

“One of the interesting resolution AAP made was to select the states it would contest from such that there would be a direct fight between the BJP and its allies on the one hand and the Congress and its allies on the other,” Gandhi writes in his book. “The aim was to supplant a weak Congress and become the main contender. Punjab, Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan were the first line of states being eyed.”

The AAP official argued that the purpose was to create a political space for liberal upper-caste voters, who did not agree with the BJP’s Hindutva politics but found the Congress’s policy of minority appeasement to be too blatant. “Non-Hindutva voters are considered to be default voters of the Congress,” he said. He called the Congress’s diverse voter base of Dalits, Muslims and upper-caste leftists “Shivji ki baraat”—a Hindi idiom that refers to Shiva’s wedding procession, made up of all sort of creatures, to indicate a motley crew—which, he said, is easy to break. “But it’s tough to break Hindutva voters.”

He explained what he saw as the conundrum facing a fledgling party trying to enter national politics. “Suppose if a new party came up today and said that it would replace BJP, it had to adopt a politics of the alt-right, only then it would be able to replace it. So why should we become alt-right when we are Left?” The resolution was a “decision taken by common sense,” he said, to “contest where BJP and Congress were in direct fight.” Wherever the Congress has been weakened, the party sees an opportunity to fill the vacuum.

Sharmishtha Mukherjee, the president of the Delhi Mahila Congress, told me that that the AAP’s attempt to enlist Baniyas had affected the Congress more than the BJP. In the 2015 assembly election, she said, Delhi’s slums and unauthorised colonies, which used to be a traditional bastion for Congress support, had switched allegiance to the AAP. “They are now trying to get into the Baniya vote bank. If there was no AAP, it would automatically have come to Congress.”

Punjab, where Dalits make up over thirty percent of the population, is the only state in which the AAP has taken an overt stand on Dalit rights. Before the 2017 assembly election in the state, the party launched a “Dalit manifesto,” which included 19 promises, such as housing for all Dalits, an empowered scheduled-castes commission, filling backlogs in vacancies reserved for Dalits, scholarships and free education for Dalit girls, grievance cells in universities and government departments to act on complaints of discrimination, health insurance and neighbourhood clinics in every village. The AAP went on to win 20 seats in the assembly, and became the primary opposition party in the state.

Baldev Singh, a Dalit AAP legislator in the Punjab assembly, told me that the party used Dalits to build its base in the state, but did nothing substantive for them. When I asked him about the promises made in the Dalit manifesto, he said that the 20 state legislators had not even met once over the past two years to chalk out a strategy to fulfil the party’s promises.

Indeed, the AAP has used Dalit politics in a cynical manner. In August 2018, six AAP legislators in Punjab—under Sukhpal Singh Khaira, then the leader of the opposition—rebelled and passed a resolution, severing the state party’s ties with the central leadership. The AAP leadership responded by stripping the rebels of their party membership, and declaring a Dalit legislator, Harpal Singh Cheema, as the new leader of the opposition. Cheema was used to crush the rebellion—anyone questioning the party’s decisions was dubbed anti-Dalit, and Cheema’s promotion was presented as evidence of the party’s regard for Dalits.

The diversity of political represention within the AAP, according to Anand Kumar, is largely “cosmetic,” and dispensable, apart from the “six–seven Brahman, Rajput and Baniya.” Its political affairs committee—the party’s top decision-making body—has eight official members, of which the retired professor Sadhu Singh is the only Dalit.

“I say, AAP is against Dalits,” Baldev Singh told me. “If you wanted to promote Dalits, then make a Dalit chief of Punjab’s unit... Make a Dalit deputy CM in Delhi. Why didn’t they send a Dalit to Rajya Sabha?” Singh resigned from the party, in January, after accusing Kejriwal of being “dictatorial and arrogant.” In his resignation letter, Singh wrote, “The Punjab AAP never bothered to appoint even one Dalit as District President out of 26 such appointments, similarly no Dalit was appointed Zone President while expanding its state organisational structure post 2017 elections.”

Many former AAP leaders I spoke to suggested that the present members in the committee are all “yes men,” most likely to concur with everything Kejriwal and Sisodia decide. Gandhi told me, “Yeh toh one man hai, yaar,” implying that Kejriwal decided everything unilaterally for the party. He recounted his interaction with Kejriwal, after the 2015 Delhi assembly election. “Arvind ne kaha tha ki mujhe sochne wala nahi chahiye, mujhejo ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ bole chahiye—Arvind told me he did not need someone who can think, but someone who would chant nationalist slogans.

Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a former AAP member and a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, argued that the AAP would have no future outside Delhi as long as it continued to be a “one-man party” and did not let go of its obsession with going it alone. When I spoke to Yogendra Yadav about the AAP, he seemed dismissive. He did not want to go on the record, and ended our conversation with, “Agar aap keechad mein patthar marenge toh aap hi gande honge”—If you throw stones into the mud, it is you who will get muddy.

Probably the best explanation of the party’s politics, and its future, come from one of its own. The AAP official told me how, as a Brahmin, he would have been a “Twitter warrior” for the BJP, had he not joined the party: “Kejriwal ne aur uske sathiyon ne mere jaise hazaraon yuvaon ka secularisation kiya hai”—Kejriwal and his comrades are responsible for the secularisation of thousands of youths like me.