These days, the moment one says “crisis in leadership", the first entity that comes to mind is the Congress party. But there is also another that ought to hold its leadership to account—the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

An accounting of sorts came to pass earlier this week when the AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal held a press conference to apologise to the people of Delhi for resigning as chief minister and quitting the government in February . This is a significant move because all along, Kejriwal had maintained that his mistake lay in not communicating his decision to the people properly—namely, that it was a decision based on principle, and that he was not running away from responsibility, unlike what large sections of even AAP supporters seemed to believe.

But now, for the first time, Kejriwal has owned up publicly that his decision itself was wrong, and that it was wrong because he took it without consulting those who had voted for his party—the same ‘aam aadmi’ whom he had thought fit to consult before taking the decision to form a minority government.

It is tempting to read a nice little moral in all this—about how even a leader who makes it a point of honour to be organically connected to the common man can so easily become disconnected from the hopes and expectations of those he believes himself to be representing. It was this disconnect, in combination with not a little hubris, that caused the series of leadership mistakes which have brought the AAP to its current pass.

In a column penned three days before Kejriwal put in his papers as the Delhi chief minister, I had written, “The more rational approach, from the long-term point of view, would be to focus on consolidation before expansion. This would entail concentrating on delivering in Delhi first, so that the city becomes a secure base for the party—which, all the euphoria notwithstanding, it still is not—from where it could steadily direct its expansion plans."

Unfortunately, Kejriwal went on to do the exact opposite. If his first mistake was to quit his chief-ministership prematurely after just 49 days in power, his second mistake was to choose the path of reckless expansion over one of consolidation and gradual expansion. Encouraged by the AAP’s spectacular debut in Delhi, he had asserted, in March this year, that his party would win around 100 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and no government at the Centre could be formed without the AAP’s support.

The idea, presumably, was to cash in on the momentum generated by the Delhi victory, and deploy it to develop a national footprint, so that by the end of the general elections, the AAP would have become a national party.

Well, two months can seem like a long time in politics. Those heady days of optimism when the AAP leadership decided to contest around 430 seats now seem like some other era—and they might well have been. For today, the AAP has just four seats to show for its ambitious expansion plan. Their biggest shock came in their supposed home ground of Delhi, where they failed to win a single seat.

All its high profile candidates—from Arvind Kejriwal and Kumar Vishwas to Yogendra Yadav, Meera Sanyal, V. Balakrishnan, and Shazia llmi—lost, and lost by huge margins. Part of the blame for this must go to Kejriwal’s third mistake: his decision to contest against Narendra Modi in Varanasi. While it did serve the purpose of sending out a strong symbolic message, it proved to be a strategic mistake.

Kejriwal, as the AAP’s star campaigner, and the face of the party, should have devoted more time and energy campaigning for the party’s winnable candidates in key constituencies. It would have given a big boost to quite a few AAP hopefuls who may have done much better had they not ended up having to fend for themselves. This is the real meaning of establishing a national footprint—using a national election as an opportunity to register the party in the minds of the electorate across the nation. But a Kejriwal caught up in Varanasi could not do so, and instead he ended up diverting scarce resources into a contest where the odds were heavily stacked against him.

Predictably, as the poll results came in, the AAP’s national ambitions received a severe reality check, with the party failing to fulfill even the minimum requirement for the national party tag—6% vote share in at least four states. Except for Punjab—where their strong showing is a separate case study in itself, and one that the AAP leadership would do well to learn from—the party drew a blank in the rest of India, with 96% of its candidates losing their deposit —an abysmal deposit retention ratio for any party with aspirations of going national.

To add insult to injury, in several key states such as Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, the AAP polled lesser number of votes than even the NOTA option . This failure in particular must have been hard to stomach given that it strikes right at the heart of the AAP’s appeal—namely, that it is an idealistic alternative to the existing brand of politics. So, for the voter to reject the AAP and opt for NOTA in such large numbers in constituencies where it had fielded candidates can mean one of two things: either that the AAP was deemed to be no different from the rest of the parties, or that its message could not be properly communicated to the electorate.

The AAP leadership, for obvious reasons, has settled for the latter explanation—for otherwise they might as well pack their bags and disband the party. Ultimately, a national performance that has been so spectacularly below their own expectations raises uncomfortable questions about the sagacity of their leadership—as it has in the case of the Congress.

As the saying goes, time and tide wait for no man. As the chief of the AAP, Kejriwal should have grabbed the opportunity that came his way, but he failed to do so. Forget being a kingmaker for a central government, it now appears that even the state of Delhi, which was within the AAP’s grasp in January, may be lost to them for some time to come.

On Wednesday, before being carted off to jail over a defamation case filed against him by the BJP leader Nitin Gadkari , the former Delhi chief minister asked for fresh elections to be held for the Delhi assembly, which is currently in suspended animation. This had come about after the AAP’s efforts to form a government for the second time—with support either from the Congress or the BJP—fell through.

And now, with an energized BJP which has its own government at the Centre, and most of its part-time volunteers likely to be suffering from poll fatigue, it is not clear how the AAP would be able to match, let alone better its December performance of 28 seats.

Some AAP leaders have taken succour in the increase of the AAP’s vote share in Delhi from 29% in the Assembly polls held in December to 33% in the Lok Sabha polls. But crucially, it is the BJP which has shown a sharper increase in vote share—from 33% in the assembly polls to 46% in the Lok Sabha polls. Plus there is a 13 percentage points difference between the BJP and the AAP—a substantial gap, and one that the AAP will be hard-pressed to close in the face of a resurgent BJP.

Kejriwal’s three mistakes have cost the AAP dear. A casual conversation with any auto-rickshaw driver in Delhi would have shown that his supporters were furious with him. So he has done well to apologize. Now the AAP needs to find a way out of the hole it has dug itself into. Whatever initiatives it may take in this regard, it must be careful not to make the same mistakes twice.

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