Journalism of Courage
After running into controversy over the death of a farmer at its kisan rally in Jantar Mantar last week, the AAP will be focusing on spreading news of the work being done by its elected representatives — especially the ‘Janta ka Budget’ initiative — to regain its political mileage.
The farmers rally — which was to be a show of strength for the AAP — had turned out to be far from ideal and had come close on the heels of a bitter internal feud which saw Yogendra Yadav, Prashant Bhushan and two more leaders being expelled. So, the party is planning to “speak only of work in the field”.
“In the next month, we will hold over 200 mohalla sabhas in the 11 constituencies that have been earmarked. The party is now concentrating on this initiative so that it goes smoothly. This will have a two-pronged benefit. First, since it is a unique exercise and involves people in decision-making, it should prove very popular among citizens. Second, we cannot afford to make any mistakes, after the kisan rally,” a senior leader said.
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Senior leaders said that it was becoming increasingly important to communicate to the people that the MLAs were “active on the ground”.
“The party is taking care to spread the word about each mohalla sabha, especially on forums like Facebook and Twitter. Our MLAs are constantly responding to requests by residents to carry out inspections and these are always put up on social media. Somebody from the MLA’s team takes photographs and videos and communicates it to the social media team,” the leader said.
With senior leaders like Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia repeatedly saying that the rationale for the Janta ka Budget was that all elected representatives were “servants of the public”, the party has now taken to calling its MLAs, jantasevaks.
“In the recent past, many comparisons have been made with other political parties. We want to show that there is a difference and small things like this also help with that,” the leader said.
