Can Student Politics Save AAP From Complete Decline? What The Launch Of ASAP Really Means

Over three months after slipping into political margins following the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) defeat in the Delhi Assembly elections, Arvind Kejriwal resurfaced to launch the party’s rebranded student wing, the Association of Students for Alternative Politics (ASAP).

As the name 'Alternative Politics' suggests, this is the pitching point for the new student wing. During the launch event on 20 May, Kejriwal said, "ASAP will not only give a new direction to student politics but will also become a strong platform for Alternative Politics."

"ASAP will create social and cultural groups in schools and colleges, where students will connect through ideas and creativity. Through this, we will prepare a young generation that will change the definition of politics and work for the country. The energy of the youth will now be channelised into the politics of change," he added.

The ‘politics of change’ was the very promise on which the Aam Aadmi Party was launched in 2013. Yet, over time, the Kejriwal-led outfit gradually adopted the very practices it once opposed: from fielding candidates with criminal backgrounds to becoming embroiled in allegations of corruption.

Initially, people believed in its 'politics of change' and the promise of 'freebies' helped it to retain power in Delhi for over a decade and also make inroads to a few other states including Punjab, where it formed the government in 2022.

The year 2022 was indeed a good one for AAP. Apart from a landslide victory in Punjab, the party also got substantial vote shares in the Goa and Gujarat assembly elections, which ultimately gave AAP the status of a 'national party' in early 2023.

But 2022 was also the year when the decline of AAP started, although its outcomes surfaced in the subsequent years. Satyendar Jain was the first Minister of the Delhi AAP government to be arrested in May 2022 in a money laundering case and the Delhi liquor scam also started surfacing in late 2022.

Then in February 2023, Deputy Chief Minister (CM) of Delhi, Manish Sisodia was arrested in the liquor policy case, followed by the arrest of then-Delhi CM Kejriwal in the same case in March 2024. Although Kejriwal got interim bail for campaigning for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the party couldn't perform well there.

Though the AAP increased its Lok Sabha seats from one in 2019 to three in 2024, the outcome was worse than expected given the fact that in Delhi, it had allied with Congress and in Punjab, it was the ruling party, securing a landslide victory just a year and half ago.

Learning from the mistakes, the AAP tried to revitalise its Delhi base for the 2025 assembly election. The foremost task was breaking the alliance with Congress and the second step was changing the leadership to beat anti-incumbency and fight the corruption allegations.

Kejriwal resigned as Delhi CM, appointing Atishi for the top post, while he himself focussed fully on the party operations and election management. Resignation was what gave Kejriwal success in the 2015 assembly election too, after he resigned within months of winning the election in 2014.

However, this time that didn't work and Kejriwal lost even from his own New Delhi assembly constituency. Only Atishi and Gopal Rai, among the top leaders of AAP, could win their respective seats.

After the loss, Kejriwal went into political silence, rarely making public appearances.

Suddenly though, on 20 May, ASAP was launched in the presence of several AAP leaders including Sisodia and Avadh Ojha, both of whom had lost in the 2025 Delhi election.

An attempt to regain political relevance?

The ouster of the party from power in Delhi was not only an electoral loss but also a loss on the political discourse front.

Before the Delhi election results, AAP used to hold regular press conferences and was extensively covered by the national media. After the loss, the media coverage of the party drastically decreased and press conferences came to a pause.

The difference could be understood from the coverage of AAP's response to the Balakot airstrikes in February 2019 and Operation Sindoor in May 2025.

While Kejriwal was seen questioning the scale of terrorist casualties after the Balakot strike, his response was quite sober on Operation Sindoor, where he only applauded the armed forces without any ifs and buts.

Not only the media coverage of his comments was less, but his remarks also showed a lack of courage to go against the flow of the national narrative.

Meanwhile, Delhi politics continued giving jolts to the AAP even after the assembly election loss. In May, the party's 16 councillors in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) resigned and formed a new political front, the Indraprastha Vikas Party.

The development comes weeks after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the MCD mayoral elections. This means that along with all seven members of Parliament (MP) of Delhi from the BJP, the MCD and the Delhi government are also under BJP.

While the AAP has been completely sidelined in Delhi, despite ruling in the union territory (UT) for over a decade, it does not want to lose ground in Punjab as well, the only state where it runs the government.

Although the assembly elections in Punjab will be held more than a couple of years later, anti-incumbency against AAP has already started building, as apparent from the party's weak showings in municipal and panchayat polls in parts of Punjab.

Before the party completely loses ground in Punjab due to reasons like deteriorating law and order situation, the farmers' discontent, the party's unfulfilled electoral promises, and the image of Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann as being 'remote-controlled' from Delhi, it needs to put its act together.

With this backdrop, we can understand ASAP as a revival pitch for the AAP. The AAP intends to connect to 5 lakh students across 50,000 colleges in India in one year through this initiative.

Can ASAP do it for AAP?

Undoubtedly, student politics plays a major role in any political party, whether for grooming future leaders, attracting youth to the party, or mobilising the masses in its favour.

The BJP's student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), formed in 1949, has given many prominent leaders to the party like Arun Jaitley, Anurag Thakur, and Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

While the ABVP attracted youth towards the BJP's ideology, it also helped the party in mobilising masses during the Emergency or the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.

Similarly, for the Congress, the National Students' Union of India (NSUI) has played an important role in grooming leaders like Ajay Maken, Randeep Surjewala and Meira Kumar.

While the role of NSUI has not been as big for the Congress, as has been that of the ABVP for the BJP, it still works to counter ABVP ideologically in several campuses, at least the premier ones.

However, for ASAP, the bigger inspirations can be Left student unions like SFI (Students Federation of India), AISF (All India Students Federation) and AISA (All India Students Association).

This is because the Left parties are on a decline in India. They are in power only in Kerala and have been reduced to single-digit seats in the Lok Sabha in the last two general elections but continue to dominate many educational institutes.

This includes Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Hyderabad University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Allahabad University, and Jadavpur University, where the Left student unions often defeat ABVP and NSUI, showing their resilience and ideological relevance.

While the ASAP has asserted that its goal is not to fight elections, but to raise students' issues across the country and connect them to 'alternative politics', its immediate focus would inevitably be on a few student elections.

As explained in the previous section, the AAP's major focus is on regaining the lost ground in Delhi and Punjab, hence, ASAP is focusing on student elections in this state, and UT, only, for now.

In separate press conferences, the Delhi and Punjab wings of the ASAP declared that they would be contesting student elections at Delhi University (DU) and Punjab University (PU), respectively.

Apart from this, ASAP will also form its units in major Delhi universities like Jamia Milia Islamia and JNU. Membership drives will be carried out in all the colleges of Punjab.

Haven't they tried it before?

Readers may recall that AAP had previously launched a student wing, the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti (CYSS), in April 2014. The aim was to challenge ABVP and NSUI on major campuses like DU and JNU.

However, it failed to secure any success. In its debut student election at DU in 2015, it failed to win any seat. After repeated failures, the CYSS allied with Left-inclined AISA in 2018 but again failed to succeed.

A student of the Hindu College in DU during that period told Swarajya, recalling, "We only used to see posters of CYSS but no on-ground mobilisation of the AAP's student wing was visible."

When even after years, the CYSS could not establish itself in DU due to a lack of strong leadership, weak organisational infrastructure and AAP’s internal focus on electoral politics over student outreach, it stopped contesting elections.

Instead, the focus shifted to PU, where its candidate won the 2022 student election for the presidential post, coinciding with the year when the AAP formed government in Punjab. But there too, the success could not last.

The last evidence of CYSS's mobilisation was visible in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, where it carried out rallies seeking votes for the AAP in the name of sympathy over Kejriwal's incarceration.

Since then, CYSS has been in a political slumber. It was not activated even during the 2025 Delhi election. While the media reports are claiming that ASAP is a rebranding of the CYSS, no official statement in this regard has come from the AAP.

Haryana vice president of AAP youth wing, Sachin Jain told Swarajya, "CYSS was aimed at raising educational and student interest issues, while ASAP aims to connect the students to educational, social and political reforms."

He further explained that by reforming CYSS and doing some 'strategic changes', the ASAP has been formed so that the youth, instead of focusing on joining the mainstream politics, does the 'politics of change'.

However, even the former CYSS functionaries themselves are not clear about what these 'reforms' or 'strategic changes' are.

Former Delhi vice president of CYSS, Ravi Pandey told Swarajya, "A student and a youth wing is important for any party. Now CYSS is no more and AAP's student wing is ASAP."

However, when asked what happened to CYSS, he said, "CYSS has not been discontinued, but just has been renamed," and conceded that he did not know why this had been done.

Can ASAP succeed?

With this level of unclarity about what has changed from CYSS to ASAP, it appears that the rebranding has been done only to get rid of the baggage of failures that CYSS had.

For now, the ASAP's focus is only to connect to as many college students as it can. For this, a membership drive has been launched, where the students can join the outfit by dropping a missed call to the helpline number.

The success of this membership drive will decide ASAP's future, but the outfit's major challenges will begin only after that. Retaining a large number of active members will be the key.

For this, the members either need to be ideologically driven or activism driven. The pitching point of ASAP is 'alternative politics', which is a notion, not an ideology.

As soon as mainstream politics delivers electoral results, the need for 'alternative politics' will not be felt. And even when mainstream politics changes itself to align with the changing trends, the 'alternative politics' will again lose relevance.

Even as a party, AAP doesn't have a definite ideology. Its only appeal was the betterment of the life of a common man with provisions of better education and health facilities, but when the promises were not fulfilled, AAP was voted out of power.

"Student politics needs connectivity to the ground, ideology, and regular connect with its followers, of which AAP has nothing," general secretary of Delhi BJP Mahila Morcha, Vaishali Poddar told Swarajya.

Without any definite ideology, it will be difficult to retain student leaders, especially when all its competitors are well-established and have a definite ideology.

For instance, the Left student unions pitch on liberalism and progressive notes, NSUI pitches on secularism and inclusivity and ABVP's focus is on nationalism and cultural pride.

Moreover, the student politics space is highly competitive, leaving less room for a new player to emerge victorious. Maybe, this is why, the ASAP's previous stint as CYSS could not succeed.

Now, coming to the second requirement of being activism-driven, this can be fulfilled by ASAP because its parent party AAP, itself has been born out of activism and continued the activism even when it was in power. This activism can help ASAP in retaining active members.

Another point that can help ASAP is attracting powerful leaders, because, in student politics, the charisma of youth leaders matters a lot. A charismatic leader can give a breakthrough to the ASAP, which it will need to sustain with efforts.

The third point that can play out in ASAP's favour is AAP's changed priorities. When AAP was expanding and succeeding, it did not feel the need to invest in its student wing and hence, CYSS faced neglect.

But now, facing decline, AAP has come to understand the need for a powerful student wing for mobilising youth in its favour and grooming young leaders, which AAP, struggling with the attrition of influential leaders, desperately needs.

Thus, ASAP, with a revived form and AAP's focus, holds the chance of succeeding in student politics. However, its critics are still pessimistic of its future.

"This might just be an attempt of Arvind Kejriwal to retain his political relevance, but given the current conditions, the path does not seem to be easy for him," BJP leader Vaishali Poddar said.