By Samanth Subramanian
The New Yorker - December 9, 2013
Delhi is too hard-bitten a city to shock easily, but it reeled on Sunday
morning, as the votes were tallied for the state-assembly election
held last week. The upstart Aam Aadmi Party, barely a year old and still
starry-eyed about the transformative power of politics, was expected to
be little more than a minor nuisance for its two larger rivals. The
Indian National Congress, which has ruled Delhi for fifteen years (and
has run the country at the head of a coalition since 2004), and the
Bharatiya Janata Party were masters of the dark art of voter
mobilization. Their systems of patronage had been entrenched for
decades. An idealist upstart like the A.A.P., which was founded to carry
forward the agenda of a checkmated anti-corruption campaign, wasn’t
supposed to stand any chance at all.
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