New Delhi: After remaining out of power for 27 long years, even in the years when Narendra Modi turned his party into the most dominant political force in the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) finally secured a comfortable majority in the Delhi assembly polls.
As the results trickled in through Saturday morning, the saffron party looked comfortably ahead of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in as many as 48 seats in the 70-member Delhi assembly, leaving behind AAP by a distance.
Yet, AAP, which bagged 22 seats and whose heavyweights like Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, Saurabh Bharadwaj and Durgesh Pathak bit the dust in their constituencies, lagged behind the BJP only marginally in terms of vote shares. AAP secured nearly 44% votes and stood respectably behind the BJP that received around 46% votes.
Congress, on the other hand, remained a non-starter but increased its vote share from 4.26% in 2020 to around 6.40% this time around – a minor bump but enough to have damaged AAP in as many as 13 constituencies where Congress’s total votes were higher than margins of victory or loss. In a way, the Congress may have prevented a hung assembly, as a swing of 13 seats would have placed both the AAP and the BJP with 35 seats each.
The AAP’s victories mostly came from reserved seats and those with a huge population of the poorest of the poor, referred to derisively as Jhuggi-Jhopri seats. Out of the 12 reserved seats, AAP won eight. It won the remaining 14 of its seats with significant slum clusters and the most underdeveloped working class inhabitations.
In contrast, the BJP scored its biggest wins in outer Delhi’s semi-urban constituencies and relatively prosperous seats of central Delhi, reflecting a success for the BJP’s systematic outreach among the formerly agrarian Jat and Gujjar demographics, middle class voters, and government servants.
Also read: Backstory: Post Major AAPset, Understanding the Decline of a Mediatised Political Party
The stark class divisions showed a strong preference of the prosperous sections for the BJP and of the poor for the AAP. Never has this inherent class apathy been this apparent in Delhi polls. The saffron party’s strategy to choke AAP politically and administratively also contributed to its nearly 7% jump in vote shares, as a large section of voters believed that only a party ruling the Centre is best placed to address the problem of multiplicity of authorities in the national capital.
The BJP first overturned the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision that granted the elected government of Delhi administrative supremacy by making crucial amendments to the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD) Act. The amendments effectively empowered the Centre’s representative, the lieutenant governor (LG), in such a way that the elected Delhi government lost its power to even appoint or transfer its officers of choice.
Secondly, when the AAP wrested the municipality from the BJP, the LG was given exclusive power by the Supreme Court to appoint “aldermen” in municipal committees, without whose approval none of the decisions can be unilaterally taken by elected councillors. It impacted AAP’s functioning in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) as its mayors could not approve any project that was worth over Rs 5 crore.
The saffron party also kept the AAP busy with the Delhi excise policy case, as the latter struggled to keep its flock together amid jailing of its biggest leaders, including the sitting chief minister Kejriwal. At the same time, its decidedly organised campaign to label the AAP and Kejriwal as corrupt seems to have worked too, the latest issue being the alleged overspending in renovation works of the chief minister’s residence that the Prime Minister Modi also invoked in his budget speech recently.
But a lack of an ideological hook may have damaged the AAP the most. The AAP’s reluctance to channel itself towards an ideological direction that distinguished it from the BJP left the party without an emotional and moral appeal – which the AAP has achieved after the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement. Its reticence to speak up on issues of justice alienated a large section of its traditional supporters among Muslim and Dalit communities.
The BJP didn’t overdo its Hindutva campaign like 2020 polls and instead competed with the AAP to promise a range of welfare measures that appeared to top Kejriwal’s “guarantees”. A large section of Delhi’s voters switched between the AAP and the BJP in assembly polls and Lok Sabha elections. The AAP could draw substantial support from those who traditionally vote for the BJP during the Lok Sabha polls because of its welfarist image. By entirely espousing welfarist politics in Delhi polls, the BJP could resolve the dilemma among swinging voters.
Yet, the AAP fought hard, as its vote shares show. It showed that even when pushed to the wall, it could still be in a fighting position. It forced the BJP to change its own electoral narrative that trashed the AAP’s welfarist approach as “revdi culture (freebies culture)” and instead imitated Kejriwal’s politics in the 2025 polls. In a way, the AAP chalked out a direction for Opposition forces to corner the BJP.
Its defeat, however, shows that an ideology-free electoral narrative, even when it is welfarist, may not be enough to take on the dominant BJP that has managed to offer something to every section of the majority Hindu population of northern India. But the divisions in electoral preferences of the rich and the poor point at a larger malaise, that of the ever-increasing inequality in Indian society.
Despite all its problems with welfare delivery in the last two years, a majority of the poor stayed with the AAP, while the relatively well-off ones switched sides. In such a scenario, the Opposition will have fewer options but to strongly represent the ever-growing poor of the country with an unequivocal ideological firmness.
