The reaction of the national political parties is born out of the shock of the AAP’s victory in Delhi.

In what appears to be a Common Minimum Programme to politically discredit the Aam Admi Party, the BJP, Congress and the Left parties are now engaged in a Q&A that they think can push the blockbuster debutant into a corner.

Among them, the most absurd argument came from the Left and their proxies: what’s the AAP’s macroeconomic policy for the country, they asked. Does the AAP have a view on liberalisation, reforms, FDIs, Pakistan, Kashmir and so on?

“The AAP has a programme and a manifesto tucked into some website, but it does not express its views — as other parties, notably the Left parties, do, on the range of issues confronting the nation — for fear, one cannot help concluding, of putting off its support base,” wrote Marxist economist Prabhat Patnaik in The Telegraph, clearly speaking for the Left.

The reaction of the national political parties is born out of the shock of the AAP’s victory - their immediate worry was the prospect of the AAP scaling up its presence across the country. So the only way to pre-empt them, or at least to take some fizz out of its spectacular victory, was to ask them some tough questions which sounded like this: “Taking the broom for water, power, shelter and food in slums and middle class homes is okay, but what do you know about the country? Do you know what it takes to be in national politics, do you how to frame policies, budgets and how to find resources?”

While arrogating to themselves the wholesale capacity to safeguard the country’s economic interests, what the Left obviously ignored is that AAP was a bottom up phenomenon owned and nurtured by people at the grassroots. A party that rose from the disgruntlement and aspirations of people and won the elections by taking up real issues - power, water, shelter, food etc - that threatened their survival on a daily basis. That too where it really mattered to people - at the local level like slums, middle class homes and colonies, where people access delivery of services.

Globally, local governance is widely acknowledged as a key building block of democratic governance - governance that is transparent, participatory, inclusive, efficient and led by people’s leaders. These building blocks should make the bigger picture where policies, authority and resources do not flow down from the top.

The sixth report of the second Administrative Reforms Commission calls local governance the “journey to the future”. And it quotes none other than Mahatma Gandhi, who spoke of a people-centred non-pyramidal structure of power.

This is what Mahatma Gandhi said about his vision of governance:

"In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever widening, never ascending, circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But, it will be an oceanic circle, whose centre will be the individual, always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of the villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance, but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integrated units. Therefore, the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle, but will give strength to all within and will derive its own strength from it."

This is more or less that language spoken by AAP in Delhi. In fact, one must credit Arvind Kejriwal and his comrades with the consistency of this language when he says he wants to consult people on the offers of support by the Congress because it was not part of their original scheme of things. The Congress and the BJP don’t get it and instead call them arrogant.

The AAP’s win is an unequivocal stamp of approval of the importance of local issues by people. The Congress, the BJP and the others might think that the people follow their politics because they like it, but AAP made it clear that it was purely out of no choice. Given a choice, people will choose the politics that seeks to take care of them.

Therefore, the macro economic policy question by the Left and other policy-competency tests by the Congress and BJP are completely irrelevant to the AAP phenomenon. They are champions of local governance and therefore should persist with the strategy as they fan out across the country because as Gandhiji said, life should not be a pyramid whose apex is sustained by the bottom.

All the national parties would love to perpetuate this pyramid; but the AAP should break it down. Delhi should be the beginning.

While restricting itself to local governance issues, does the AAP have a chance in national politics?

Of course it does. In fact its strength will come from its depth at the grassroots. Panchayats and municipalities as the building blocks for the state and the country is the model that the Congress and the BJP paid only lip service to. It’s time this model started to work.

So what should be the AAP’s economic policy for the country? Let the people - and not the government of India mandarins and the Left academics - decide.

Among the national parties, the Left - more specifically the CPM - should be seriously worried about the ascendance of the AAP because their constituencies are the same. The CPM and other Left parties are supposed to take care of people and their issues; instead what they are engaged in is collecting money, talking big, organising never ending multi-tier committee meetings, passing resolutions and unleashing contract criminals and academics on its political opponents. Somebody appealing to their constituency will certainly make them anxious. No wonder, Prabhat Patnaik even discredits the AAP’s voters by calling them “right-of-centre”.

As far as AAP’s politics go, it should stick to its strength of local governance that lets people share the "majesty of the oceanic circle" called India. We need a new India, where, as Gandhi envisaged, "the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle, but will give strength to all within and will derive its own strength from it."