A Delhi Divided: The 2025 Polls Show the Rich Are Now Openly Contemptuous of the Poor

New Delhi: Rarely has the national capital seen an assembly election where the class divide among its voters has been so palpable. 

The last few elections of Delhi have seen many ups and downs. The three-term stint of chief minister Sheila Dikshit – who had managed to hold the Congress together in her time – collapsed under a surge of citizen activism in the aftermath of the Commonwealth scam and the brutal gang rape of a paramedical student in 2012. 

A fledgling Aam Aadmi Party voiced the angst on the streets and ended up steering the Delhi government for two rocky terms, fighting incessant attacks by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress and struggling to keep its flock together amidst controversial exits of some of its founding members and a spate of arrests of its top leaders, including chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia.  

Despite all of its problems, Kejriwal and his welfare schemes for the poor successfully kept the BJP from assuming power in spite of the fact that the latter has consistently polled over 32% votes in Delhi. 

Irrespective of the outcome, however, when it came to elections, Delhi’s rich, poor, and middle classes never reflected the deep divisions that are inherent in the city’s social make-up.

But now, go and ask a businessman, or even a shopkeeper, whom he supports and he is most likely to pledge his allegiance to the BJP. A salaried professional, too, will be seen rooting for change. Scores of daily wage workers, slum-dwellers, and migrant factory workers will calmly tell you that Kejriwal is better for Delhi, even though some of them may believe that Narendra Modi is the best person to lead India. 

Whither aam aadmi?

Divisions are stark. “Kejriwal pretended to be an aam aadmi [an ordinary man]. He swore that he will continue to live in his modest flat but now he has gone ahead and built a sheesh mahal [a royal glass palace] for himself,” Jatish Jain, an antique exporter in Gole Market told The Wire. 

The BJP has been running a campaign against Kejriwal around the issue of alleged overspending to renovate the chief minister’s residence and has accused Kejriwal of building a sheesh mahal for himself. The AAP has dismissed these allegations, and also the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report that first pointed to overspending as baseless and politically-motivated. It also threw open the chief minister’s residence for the public to examine the charges for themselves, but the Delhi police, which is governed by the Union home ministry, stopped both the media and people from entering the premises.  

Shubham Mishra, an employee of Jatish Jain’s, who was quietly listening to his boss taking the AAP to cleaners waited till Jain left for a phone call to talk to this reporter. “I have lived in Delhi for the last 30 years. I have seen no other government that is concerned with the plight of the poor like us. Our area received proper electricity and water pipelines only after he came to power. He may not have fulfilled all his promises but he is still better than most other leaders,” he said in a rush.  

The public mood on the streets in the run-up to the 2025 assembly polls is replete with such perceptions. The poor support the AAP, even if hesitatingly, as many among them believe that the pace with which Kejriwal initiated his welfare programmes in the first term has slowed down in his second. Yet, other parties in the fray, according to them, are not comparable as far as governance aspects like delivery of welfare programmes is concerned. 

The rich and the middle classes are virulently critical of Kejriwal for the crumbling infrastructure of the city, issues like pollution, frequent flooding and traffic congestion, and his apparently singular focus towards non-Delhiites and jhuggi-jhopri (slum) colonies. Unlike the last two elections, these sections have shown unusual zeal in voicing their angst against the AAP government and pleading for a change of reign. As a result, the BJP that was dumped by even these classes on previous occasions has received tremendous fillip in its 2025 campaign. 

However, given that Delhi’s demographics are shifting in favour of the poor and migrants, the road to victory is anything but certain for the BJP. Although it has grown from being seen as a leaderless party in the national capital to one that is seen as the only alternative to AAP, the saffron party has not shown any confidence to advance an alternative political vision, and has entirely relied on Hindutva and a shrill exercise in labelling the AAP as corrupt. 

AAP’s successful development model

Rather, the BJP, and even the Congress, have come across as poor copies of the development framework that the AAP has defined. Both the parties have promised a number of welfare schemes like monthly allowances for women, health and life insurances to all, and student scholarships but have stayed away from the fundamental aspect of AAP’s development paradigm, which is to revamp the national capital’s public health and education infrastructure. 

Kejriwal has hardly missed a chance to say that his government is the only one in India to spend 40% of its budget on hospitals and schools. His gaze has remained on the poor and their shelters, and that has been the primary reason that he remains a favourite among the underprivileged. 

BJP president J.P. Nadda had to assert while releasing the party manifesto that none of the welfare schemes initiated by Kejriwal will be discontinued but will be implemented much better than the “corrupt” AAP administration. 

Against such a backdrop, both the BJP and the Congress have only doubled down on the promises that are often associated with AAP. If Kejriwal first promised a monthly allowance of Rs 2,100, the BJP has assured a sum of Rs 2,500, and an additional subsidy of Rs 500 on LPG cylinders. It also said that households will be provided one cylinder free during Holi and Diwali. The Congress has also promised a monthly stipend of Rs 2,500 for women. 

Similarly, to counter AAP’s handout of 200 units of free electricity, the Congress has promised an additional 100 units of free electricity while the BJP has assured voters of continuing this sop. Identical competitive populism can also be seen in other such handouts such as health and life insurance, water bills, public transport discounts, scholarships and so on. 

But Congress and BJP have scored over AAP by cornering Kejriwal over his failure to generate promised jobs in Delhi. Thus, Congress has promised a monthly stipend of Rs 8,500 to unemployed youth for a year, while BJP has said that it will open up 50,000 vacancies in the government and has assured opportunities for self-employment that may benefit around 20 lakh people. 

Focus on work not done

Notwithstanding such a bidding process for votes, sharp divisions along class in Delhi have forced all the parties in the fray, especially BJP and AAP, to take note of their blind spots. While releasing the party manifesto, Kejriwal unusually foregrounded his assurances to the middle classes and the rich. He said that he couldn’t fulfil three of his promises from 2020, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and arrests of top party leaders in fake cases. He added that the BJP used this window to deliberately worsen the situation of Delhi to corner the AAP and asked people not to vote for a party that could stake people’s welfare for political gains. 

Kejriwal went on to assure people that four of his priorities would be to clean up the Yamuna river, facilitate potable water to all households, turn Delhi’s roads into those that are seen in European countries, clean existing sewer lines immediately and revamp the city’s sewerage entirely within a few years to prevent flooding. At the same time, he added that his focus, if elected for the third time, will be to generate jobs. 

“My team and I are educated. We have a plan on how to get these things done. We have the budget for it. I urge people of Delhi to vote for a government that is overseen by educated people,” he declared.

Contrastingly, the BJP that under the leadership of Modi had only shamed the AAP for distributing “revdi” (sweetmeats made up of sesame seeds but used here as a metaphor for freebies) has concentrated its entire campaign on populist promises, and has not shown the confidence to stick to its market-oriented development approach. Its conventional strategy to pit the “BJP model” versus the “AAP model” has vanished. 

Amidst such a role reversal, the stage is set for yet another Delhi assembly election. And, although all parties have trained their attention on the ever-growing urban poor, there has never been an occasion where contempt for them is so starkly visible in the streets of Delhi.