In a stunning victory, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) swept the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) out of Delhi. Results of the February 7 elections to the Delhi Assembly were announced on Tuesday.
The AAP won a staggering 67 seats in the 70-member Assembly with its vote share soaring to 54.3 per cent from the 33.8 per cent it got in the Lok Sabha election last year. The BJP got only three seats with 32.2 per cent vote share as the Congress, in a first, drew a blank with just about 9.7 per cent of the vote.
At the AAP office, Chief Minister-elect Arvind Kejriwal presented the perfect picture of a family man. Hugging his wife Sunita, an Indian Revenue Service officer, Kejriwal thanked the electorate. “I salute the people of Delhi. They have achieved something spectacular.”
Winning the hearts of the masses and classes, the AAP stormed traditional Congress bastions, particularly the minority-dominated areas and the slum clusters, where the promise of free power found great resonance. The party also swept the posh South Delhi constituencies. In winning over the urban underclass, which had so far been voting for Shiela Dikshit’s version of Congress welfarism, and capturing the elite constituencies that had been swayed by Narendra Modi’s development plank in the Lok Sabha poll, Kejriwal’s appeal cut across every section of the electorate.
The AAP steam-rollered opposition in Valmiki and Muslim dominated seats such as Trilokpuri and Seelampur as well as the upmarket constituencies of Greater Kailash and Malviya Nagar.
As a BJP veteran in Delhi explained, voting trends indicate that the AAP managed to consolidate the entire anti-BJP vote, which earlier used to get dispersed among the Congress, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Samajwadi Party and the Left.
According to this leader, the consolidation of the anti-BJP vote is the reason the party won just three seats even after retaining 32.2 per cent of the vote share, which is only marginally lower than its 33.07 per cent vote share in December 2013; it had picked up 31 seats then.
Also, the AAP was able to catch the imagination of the “aspirational voter” hitherto attracted to Narendra Modi, accounting for the party’s additional 14 per cent vote share in the Lok Sabha election. For the BJP, the development rhetoric and the ‘Modi magic’ failed to work. The BJP lost in all but one — Rohini — of the five seats where the Prime Minister addressed mega-rallies. Of the other four constituencies, in Ambedkar Nagar and Dwarka, AAP candidates won by over 40,000 votes. In Karkardooma, which falls in the Krishna Nagar constituency, the AAP nominee defeated Kiran Bedi, the BJP’s chief Ministerial candidate. And Ballimaran, the home of the Ramlila Maidan from where Modi had addressed his first rally, also went to the AAP.
BJP president Amit Shah’s strategy of inducting Kiran Bedi and projecting her as the chief ministerial candidate came a cropper. This was a departure from the strategy followed since the Lok Sabha elections where the BJP did not project a chief ministerial candidate, and fought the elections on the Prime Minister’s popular appeal.
Shah also inducted several other outsiders, including Krishna Tirath from the Congress, Vinod Kumar Binny and MS Dhir from the AAP.
But the strategy backfired as Bedi not only failed to mount a serious challenge to Kejriwal, she also alienated the party’s State satraps and provoked dissension in the ranks. Bedi lost from Krishna Nagar, a seat known as the BJP’s “fortress”, from where party veteran Harsh Vardhan has been elected five times. Binny and Dhir lost from Patpargunj and Jungpura, respectively.
As BJP spokespersons struggled to assert that the Delhi elections were neither a reflection on the Prime Minister or the party president, or indeed a referendum on the BJP regime at the Centre, the AAP was eager to drive home the message that the “Modi juggernaut had been stopped,” as senior AAP leader Yogendra Yadav put it.
While the BJP suffered a severe loss of face, humiliation was reserved for the Congress, whose vote share appeared to be in a free fall — from 24.55 per cent in the 2013 Assembly elections to 15.22 per cent in the Lok Sabha polls in May 2014 to 9.7 per cent in the just concluded Assembly poll. Taking responsibility for the defeat, Congress general secretary Ajay Maken said the election in Delhi was fought on local issues. “I carried the party promises and the manifesto to the people. People rejected that. So, the responsibility squarely lies with me,” he insisted, in a bid to insulate Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi.