Common Man Anti-Corruption Party - India

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Nathan Schneider:

"During the last days of 2013, I happened to be in Delhi when an outgrowth of India’s anti-corruption movement—the Aam Aadmi Party, meaning “common man”—assumed power in the regional government. It was a rapid and stunning upset—a monumental back-door hack, really. The leader was Arvind Kejriwal, a former tax official with an engineering degree who was always carefully dressed in street clothes. He fashioned himself an Internet-savvy Gandhi, preaching autonomy for the villages and class mobility for the legions of ambitious tech workers in the cities. The tech and the politics could seem interchangeable; an opinion column in the December 30 Hindustan Times, printed alongside articles assessing Kejriwal’s euphoric ascent, saw fit to use the occasion to call for “aam aadmi computing,” by which it meant more user-friendliness in corporate productivity software. Kejriwal himself, however, would resign from the Delhi government after just 49 days, unable to pass his stringent anti-corruption agenda. AAP’s only goal was to inject that code into the system, like a hacker rigging a database injection; it was unwilling to play ordinary, rough-and-tumble politics. In the subsequent national elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s brew of neoliberal economics and Hindu fundamentalism won out." (http://www.therowboat.com/books/why-we-hack/)