Other than the seeming end of an unusual political experiment represented by the Aam Aadmi Party led by Arvind Kejriwal – which raised expectations of a new corruption-free political order with its chief claiming the party had “no ideology” – AAP’s recent defeat is par for the course as the Bharatiya Janata Party finds itself back in the saddle to administer Delhi after a quarter century’s break.
AAP’s recession is no different from a normal electoral event though some – not only its voters – were left morose by the outcome and felt that a remarkably good thing had ended.
Does AAP’s defeat have a deeper political meaning? That will of course depend on the state of the post-defeat AAP.
Master of demagoguery, the big-talking Kejriwal lost his own assembly seat in the election. When the Narendra Modi regime dragged him and his senior colleagues to jail in the alleged liquor scam case, which appears politically motivated, he declared that the people of Delhi would decide whether he was tainted or not – as though that was an appeal to a higher dispensation.
May be that was just his style and wasn’t meant seriously, or he possibly made a rash statement thinking that he could not lose. But now the ‘people’s verdict’ is in. If the party scatters seeing that its leader is out on a limb and that the liquor case could drag on for years, then Delhi is likely to return to the old pattern of being a ‘BJP versus Congress’ action field.
AAP really has no mass leader other than Kejriwal to keep the flock together – and animated. Nor does it have an explicated ideology, although it’s long been thought that assiduous appeasement of the religious majority has guided several of its actions, and sometimes glaring inaction. It’s time in office is also now an open book – and the party no longer seems all that different from other parties.
The AAP government did much good with the government school system though some of that is said to be depleting, and to an extent the health-at-your-doorstep system which has faced rougher weather. But both were good initiatives and showed what focused governmental effort can do.
However, do these things in themselves make for a soft, welfarist, people-oriented government coming on top of cut-rate water and electricity supply? Is working for social harmony and social cohesion not a part of good governance and is at all times a desirable constitutional-backed objective aimed at long-term stability and success of a society?
Regrettably, the AAP party and government courted overt Hindu religiosity no less than a BJP dispensation might, as though state-sponsored public display of this nature – led by the principal leaders – was a public good.
When politically instigated very violent communal riots erupted in northeast Delhi in which establishment party figures as well as the police acted in a one-sided manner, the AAP government remained politically aloof or intervened in a prejudicial manner against the minorities.
At the time of the massive protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act by Muslim women which caught world attention, Kejriwal as chief minister showed where his inner voice sprang from. But such factors have not troubled the liberal class too much. The idea of the philosophy of governance under AAP appears to be of no concern or consequence in assessing the AAP phenomenon.
In the overall political atmosphere that has prevailed in the country for the past 10 years, especially in northern India, AAP – if it aimed for good governance – could have shown the way. It could have set an example for the nation and compensated – through righteous action – for the social and psychological bruising to the body politic caused by the custodians at the Union government and their uncivil civil society appendages which seemed to have a free run of the place unrestrained by social norms, administrative precedents, or fear of judicial intervention (which alas have been few and far between, no matter at what level we, as body politic, judge the judges).
In assessing AAP’s trajectory after the Delhi defeat, we need to see how things go for it in Punjab, where it runs the state government after pulling off a victory in special circumstances. But the government seems to be in all sorts of trouble although there is no “Delhi L-G factor” to trip it up unless Kejriwal himself is deemed “the L-G”. His summoning of party’s Punjab MLAs to Delhi after the defeat has sent out confusing signals of undue interference.
AAP had gained something of a halo from the time of its founding. It had come out of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement which drew the middle classes in general, and the idealistic youth in particular, in droves as these sections sought deliverance from power-grabbing tendencies of politicians of all hues. Adulation dripped from media accounts of its activities.
This was probably also because the movement was taking aim at the Congress government led by Manmohan Singh, who enjoyed an immaculate image for probity. In the eyes of some, cutting across the ideological divide at the all-India level, the tactical imperative of breaking that image was important from a long-term consideration, although in the end that tactical goal was taken to its logical end only by one ideological group.
In bits and pieces, details came out that the anti-corruption ‘crusade’ had really been got up with the support of entities at New Delhi’s Vivekananda Foundation where Hindutva-oriented sentiments are said to be privileged. However, none of this had much effect on the AAP’s – and the Kejriwal government’s – carefully cultivated crusading, common man image (although this was bereft of class or caste awareness).
Consequently, many evaluated the party’s recent Delhi defeat as unnatural, and the result of evil design. Mismanagement and popular discontent were not mentioned, or were sought to be minimised, in the hierarchy of likely causes. The mind-set of liberalism seemed to trump the larger societal notion of democracy.
Votes
While no proof has surfaced, it is not unlikely that the allegation of ballot stuffing in the Delhi election – on the lines of the recent state polls in Haryana and Maharashtra – may yet be found to be sustainable, though digging up evidence may now be rendered more difficult than before.
The reason is that instead of answering pointed questions on suspected rigging in BJP’s favour in the Haryana election, leading to the party’s win by a sliver of a margin against the run of play, the government has lately changed the rules (on the recommendation of the Election Commission) so that the public is now legally barred from demanding and accessing poll-related documents, including video documents that may reveal goings-on at polling stations, raising questions around the very fairness of the election process in present-day India.
The rule change notwithstanding, giving an example from the Maharashtra assembly poll, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, cited the instance of a single address where 7,000 new voters were found. The PM avoided the issue in his reply to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President’s address.
In light of the stunning Maharashtra example presented by Gandhi, the Data Point feature of the The Hindu (February 12) occasions surprise. It reproduces Election Commission figures to suggest that the addition to voters’ lists in Haryana, Maharashtra and Delhi (the data is for Jharkhand too) – even if they seemed large in the context of just a few months – is, in fact, not extraordinary and indeed corresponds with the norm observed in earlier elections. Ergo, opposition parties are yet to make their case (for ballot stuffing).
However, even going by the cold logic of official figures alone, is it not feasible that the actual polling was lower than the norm and extra votes were polled through EVM machines (in addition to voter list manipulation)? The unquestioning reproduction of data without context can distort reality. Gandhi’s Maharashtra example is a reminder.
The point about the recent Delhi assembly election, however, seems to be that even when making room for poll rigging and for Modi’s retributive actions against Kejriwal, the AAP lost as much as 10% of the vote share over its performance of five years ago.
Besides, the AAP’s drop was more or less reflected in a corresponding rise for BJP – and it was huge. In what was a more or less a direct contest between two parties (with Congress a virtual bystander), the impact of a 10% swing can blow a hole through most calculations.
What’s pretty impressive for AAP, though, is that it could still manage to hold on to 43% of its 2020 vote share. The data analysis using the median method by Pavan Korada in The Wire (and by others elsewhere) shows that AAP held on to a reasonable share of votes of the poorer classes and castes across categories. But it is no less noteworthy that the BJP gained from the AAP across all categories.
It was only among Muslims that AAP and BJP were down, while the Congress did better than expected within a low band of expectation. It is interesting that after the AAP defeat, unlike the archetypical liberal, Muslim voters are not moaning. Anecdotal information points a certain way – that it does not matter to them whether it’s the AAP forming the government in the national capital or the BJP.
An anarchist
In line with his disavowal of ideology and promise to root out corruption, Kejriwal also called himself an “anarchist” once. This is odd vocabulary for a democratically elected leader, besides being quite different from the meaning of that word in political literature. But for many, Kejriwal’s usage translated to disruptor of the established pattern of the governance system and they waited in anticipation.
The Kejriwal way was to be achieved by cutting through constitutional norms and the institutional regime, and inciting the poor to go into direct action by secretly videoing bribe-seeking petty officials. In short, this was playing populism to the hilt to earn political merit, especially in the eyes of the poor. A former Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi, Najeeb Jung, brings this out candidly in a recent interview to a video channel.
This brand of populism is akin to what Modi had done when announcing demonetisation, which produced disastrous results for the national economy and led to social and political lumpenisation of the poorer sections of society that would keep them from critically questioning policy actions meant to alleviate their concerns. Religious instigation was thrown into this mix for good measure.
The denigration of ideology and appeal to anarchism was music to many ears, especially amongst the middle classes – and the liberal-minded slice of the elite or the professional classes who tend to view ideology as a tainting factor, although they themselves are steeped in the ideology of unfettered market-oriented economics and political philosophy that swings from extreme to extreme.
For this reason many amongst them had also welcomed the arrival of Modi on the national scene in 2014. His mantra of “minimum government, maximum governance” sent this class into a tizzy. Forgotten in a moment was the criminality of the Gujarat communal violence of 2002 on Modi’s watch which impacted national social and political unity.
Modi appeared to be the Great Disruptor of the moment who would usher in a new era of politics. Broadly speaking, to large swathes of India’s middle classes as well as liberalist opinion – distinct from Left opinion or even the opinion of the god-fearing, traditionalist ‘Hindu’ – an open or beneath-the-surface attack on the minorities, especially Muslims, is not frequently given negative weightage as a factor. The middle classes can swing notoriously from the far Right to the far Left or the other way round.
In the final analysis, anti-incumbency took its toll after 10 years and the natural challenger, BJP, scored an assembly win in Delhi after a quarter century or so. There was no other viable competition to the AAP or the BJP left in the field. In an article on “perception shift”, the Data Point series in The Hindu (February 17, 2025) noted, “In the early days of campaigning, the AAP remained ahead of the BJP in perception vote share, indicating that a larger section of voters believed it could return to power….However, its fortunes started declining after the BJP’s campaign machinery was set in motion ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first rally on January 5. From January 1, AAP’s perception vote share margin over the BJP dropped from +19.8% to -11.8% points.”
The Congress, which earlier ruled the roost along with the Jana Sangh and its later avatar the BJP, has been organisationally practically defunct in the National Capital Territory’s political arena since it surrendered the bastion to AAP in 2013 after a 15-year heady run under the late Sheila Dikshit.
Interestingly enough, when AAP held sway in Delhi’s assembly polls, the BJP blanked it out in two consecutive elections in all the seven Delhi Lok Sabha seats. Even the decimated Congress did better than AAP in voting percentage terms.
Clearly, the Delhi voter thought of AAP strictly for local governance in a large-sized metropolitan area and voted for the ideological national parties for parliament. This was principally because of the free or practically free water and electricity offered by the AAP government.
Also read: How Arvind Kejriwal’s Arrogance Led to the AAP’s Decline
While AAP appropriated much of the earlier Congress base of the poorer groups and the minorities, a significant section of its supporters also overlapped with BJP’s. These sections chose Kejriwal’s AAP for the water and electricity subsidies and for parliament Modi’s BJP, with which they appeared to be ideologically aligned. That appears to have changed this time with Modi promising in his campaign not to withdraw the existing subsidies.
The ‘larger opposition’ question
In this backdrop, it is not quite clear why in some quarters larger meanings for the opposition INDIA alliance have been read into AAP’s defeat. These broadly hint at serious, national-level consequences for the alliance since UP’s Samajwadi Party and Bengal’s Trinamool Congress declared their support for AAP as against Congress in the Delhi polls. Further, Congress is thought to have been the factor for AAP’s defeat in about a dozen of the 70 UT constituencies.
Both assumptions look to be erroneous. On the all-India chess-board, even before the Delhi election, some regional INDIA partners seized on Congress’s recent defeats against the BJP in Haryana and Maharashtra – against the run of play – to denigrate the national party and question its de facto position as the leader of the INDIA alliance. This is distinctly odd as the opposition alliance has no named formal leader. Further, if Congress is taken out of the equation from the INDIA alliance, then all that’s left is a disparate bunch of regional parties with local political ambition but little by way of ideological coherence or vision. That’s the nature of the beast.
In reality, Trinamool Congress and AAP were distinct from the others in INDIA, with the former not even acknowledging its presence in the forum in the May 2024 Lok Sabha election – and AAP doing so with marked disinterest. There has really been no INDIA to speak of after the parliament poll, although Congress leader Rahul Gandhi nodded acknowledgement to the (mythical!) grouping in his reply to the President’s address as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.
As for the limited question of voting in Delhi, it is true that on about a dozen seats AAP candidates lost by margins of votes that the Congress candidate received. The inference is these would have automatically gone to AAP if the Congress was not around. This is a tempting alibi but not a sustainable argument. A fraction of this vote would indeed go to the BJP which also gets the support of some non-communal sections. The Congress too takes the vote of politically non-aligned sections which may in some situations go to the BJP.
On the alliance question, expecting the Congress to go with AAP was a tall order in this election, given the AAP attitude of disdain toward the minorities and its indirect fanning of the communal sentiment. It is another matter that it is the AAP that first announced there would be no truck with the Congress, possibly confident of its victory. Congress has in fact been seen as an adversary by AAP for a considerable time.
Should the AAP scatter as a viable political entity after Kejriwal’s defeat – and that is the big question to which the politically inclined are seeking answers – it is the Congress that is likely to fill the vacuum if (and only if) it can put in the required organisational effect. There is a long way to go but the infrastructure of organisation and the memory of politics is far from faded.