AAP and Arvind Kejriwal have lost the Delhi election. Indeed Kejriwal has even lost his seat. He had declared once that there was no force on earth that could defeat him and his party.

As Abraham Lincoln is believed to have said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Truth be told they were both just a massive con job and they had reduced Delhi to a pitiable state. They were bound to be called out eventually. That’s happened now.

The wonder is that they managed to win two successive elections, after doing very well in 2013. Their performance in 2013 and in 2015 were understandable. They had promised change. But the third in 2020 was a surprise, at least the extent of it. They had won 62 of the 70 seats.

Kejriwal was also unable to get along with party colleagues. He created a one man party. All that the BJP had to do was to pull him down from the exalted status of ‘clean man’ he had tried to create for himself.

How did this reversal come about? Recently there was a tiny little news item saying that the BJP and the Congress were joining forces to fight village council elections in western Mizoram against a local political formation.

This, perhaps, albeit in an unstated way, is what’s happened in the recent Delhi election too. It doesn’t take much brain power to see that both the BJP and the Congress would like to see AAP wiped out. From the results it would seem that AAP still has 43.5 per cent vote share. So where have the votes for the BJP come from?

Just remember: Congress got zero seats. Its votes had been going to AAP. Where did they go now? What the nature of the deal between the Congress and the BJP is should be quite clear.

Two into three won’t go

It is a well established fact of physics that a system with three variables is inherently unstable. It’s called the three-body problem. I don’t want to stretch the analogy with celestial mechanics too far but the basic point remains.

One of the clearest illustrations of this instability was provided by the mathematician economist Harold Hotelling nearly 100 years ago. It’s called the Hotelling Theorem and shows what happens on a beach when a third ice cream seller, with a different looking cart, arrives.

Until then, when there are only two sellers, they divide up their territories equally. They stand at the midpoint. It is a stable equilibrium.

But as soon as a third vendor comes, each of them starts shifting positions every day to maximise his or her catchment area. They keep doing this and don’t settle down till one of them leaves the beach.

In celestial mechanics either two of the three orbiting bodies collide or one of them is ejected. That’s what’s happened to the AAP now. Delhi’s politics can now return to its long-term stability of a two-party system.

Even in politics you will not find three parties competing for long. The problem of course is that you can’t predict which of the three will exit.

A BJP-Congress alliance?

In the longer term, it would probably be best if the Congress and the BJP either merged or formed an alliance. At present the only reason the Congress refuses to do this is the ego of the Gandhi family.

But its vote share is stuck at around 20 per cent. That doesn’t look as if it will increase anytime soon. If anything, it can only go down.

Its problem is that it has taken up a cause — secularism — that has zero political value because its definition of secularism is all wrong. The Congress wants the individual to be secular whereas genuine secularism requires the state to be secular which the Indian state is.

Rahul Gandhi doesn’t understand this. He bangs on about secularism and the Constitution without having the faintest idea about either. That confuses the voter who votes for a more comprehensible alternative, namely, freebies.

Kejriwal understood this and expanded the range of freebies. He forgot that what he could do, the central government could do ten times better.

There’s now the question of his party’s survival. One indicator might be the AIADMK. As long as its two main leaders were around it seemed invincible. Indeed it was the pioneer of freebies.

Now it’s nearly gone. That’s a fate that could well overwhelm AAP.

In celestial mechanics either two of the three orbiting bodies collide or one of them is ejected. That’s what’s happened to the AAP now.

Published on February 9, 2025