A flood of commentaries on the defeat of the Aam Aadmi Party in the Delhi elections has highlighted how the old anti-corruption crusader himself fell victim to the liquor scam and the ‘Sheesh Mahal’ lure, but few have mentioned the elaborate machinations and the cloak-and-dagger operations that went on to defame the party and make it unpopular.
Beginning with the Haryana elections, the BJP has stopped relying only on Narendra Modi’s rallies and roadshows for victory. The prime minister is now just one of the star campaigners. The old strategy has been replaced with a set of micro-level gameplans.
The main items in the BJP’s new toolkit are the character assassination of opposition stalwarts with the use of the Enforcement Directorate and Central Bureau of Investigation, choking their administration in states through meddling by the Lieutenant Governor or Governor, withholding or denying central funds, systematic tinkering of voter lists through additions and deletions, and reckless freebies – all supported by massive election funds.
The plan was field-tested in Haryana, then deployed in Maharashtra and now in Delhi where it was personally supervised by the regime’s second most powerful man directly from his North Block office. In Delhi, every arm of the Union government participated: the Lieutenant Governor, the police, ED and CBI, the municipal corporation, and the urban development ministry, with bit roles played by others.
Weakening
In 2021, the home ministry amended the NCT Act to transfer the power of appointments from the state government to the Centre. The Delhi Municipal Corporation Act came next.
The AAP was under siege from all sides. Its top leaders, including Arvind Kejriwal, his trusted deputy Manish Sisodia and MP Sanjay Singh, were put in jail under various charges framed by the enforcement agencies. At one stage, there was also talk of the possible arrest of new chief minister Atishi.
Kejriwal and the others were released under the Supreme Court’s orders between August and October 2024, a few months before the assembly elections. Their long absence had rendered the AAP leaderless and left the organisation in a shambles. Allegations were made that intimidation and inducements were being used to get AAP leaders to defect to the BJP. Four days before polling, eight leaders, including seven sitting MLAs, resigned from the primary membership of AAP, citing ‘growing’ corruption in the party and ‘deviation from principles’. A few hours before the polling began, an FIR was filed against Kejriwal. Chief minister Atishi and Kejriwal had met the chief election commissioner the day before to complain about the misuse of police to prevent AAP supporters and slum dwellers from voting.
At the government level, Union home minister Amit Shah worked to render the AAP administration ineffective. In May 2022, he replaced Anil Baijal as Delhi’s lieutenant governor with his trusted man V.K. Saxena. It is not that Baijal was helping the AAP. On the contrary, his tenure was marked by constant conflict with Kejriwal. But Saxena was seen as a quiet operator with a better equation with Shah. He opposed every decision taken by the elected government, thus paralysing the administration. State BJP leaders made it a point to amplify the L-G’s diatribe against the elected government on every available issue.
The amendment of the NCT Act in 2021 had been the last nail in the coffin of the parliamentary system of governance in Delhi. It put in black and white that the ‘government of Delhi means L-G.’ The power shift from the elected legislature to the appointed bureaucrat negated the very principle of primacy to the will of the people.
Also read: AAP and Why the Delhi Assembly Polls Were a Natural Fallout
This also led to a grave administrative crisis. Department secretaries, even the junior officers, publicly disobeyed the AAP ministers. With divided loyalty and knowing where the real power vested, many senior officers acted as agents of the Union government. Often without the minister’s consent, they referred the cabinet papers to the L-G, for endorsement. Thus, Delhi Raj Bhawan became a rival power centre.
Kejriwal publicly stated that the officials were routinely disobeying the written orders of Delhi ministers and cited specific instances. Atishi complained that the chief secretary refused to carry out her written directions on the coordination mechanism for National Capital Civil Supplies Authority.
For the Modi-Shah duo, the subsequent confusion served a dual purpose. First, it helped them portray the AAP ministers as inefficient. Second, during the elections, they used it as a lever to blackmail the voters. As Harvard public policy graduate Akshay Marathe says: “A gun was held to the heads of Delhi voters: ‘If you do not vote for the BJP, your city government will remain dysfunctional and it will decline’.”
Numbers
Soon after the Maharashtra elections last November, we had in these columns discussed the shifts in the BJP’s election strategy. This has now evolved into an elaborate blueprint. The shift from the Modi cult to state-specific micro-management began with the Haryana polls.
For all these years, mega rallies of Narendra Modi with all their pomp and glitter and his roadshows formed the core of the BJP’s election campaign. A dozen such rallies and street shows in each state invariably ensured a BJP victory. Thus, these also formed an integral part of the duo’s ‘elected dictator’ project. However, the government’s languishing welfare schemes, a failing economy and unkept ‘Modi guarantees’ eroded the much-acclaimed Modi magic.
Forced to face this reality, the duo turned to political engineering at the micro level. The new strategy gives overriding priority to booth-level focus on the electoral lists. Consider what happened in Maharashtra and Delhi – new names were added and existing names removed in bulk, with opposition parties alleging that the deletions took place in constituencies where they had led in the Lok Sabha elections. In Delhi, the total number of registered voters increased unusually by as much as 3,99,362 people during the seven months between the 2024 Lok Sabha election and the 2025 assembly election. As against this, the total number of voters increased by 416,648 in four years between the 2020 assembly election and 2024 Lok Sabha election. Clearly, poll-eve bulk increase in the number of voters is fast becoming a national pattern.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi at a joint media conference with other opposition alliance leaders said 39 lakh new voters were added in Maharashtra in five months after the Lok Sabha polls and before the assembly election. Only 32 lakh new voters had been added during the five-year period between 2019 and 2024.
Gandhi also said the voter population of the state was 9.7 crore, higher than the total adult population of Maharashtra, which was 9.54 crore. The Election Commission said it would soon come out with full facts, but these are still awaited.
For free
‘Revdi’ has been the other winning chip. Modi has often lambasted the opposition for offering freebies, warning in Uttar Pradesh in July that the ‘revdi culture for votes’ was taking the country towards ‘darkness’, and repeating the charge in Madhya Pradesh in October. In Karnataka, he said the opposition was ‘submerging the state in debt.’
Look at the paradox. In Haryana, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and now Delhi, the BJP has merrily gone around distributing freebies. In Maharashtra, 200 such initiatives costing Rs 1 lakh crore were announced by the NDA. In Delhi, it came in three instalments and included free scooters, bicycles, Rs 51,000 for a daughter’s marriage, a special gift of Rs 51,000 for daughters of poor widows, pension for the disabled, widows and destitute women.
Some of the Election Commission’s actions have raised questions. The opposition saw red over its refusal to upload form 17C and reveal the number of votes polled in each assembly booth. “This was in spite of our repeated requests to do so,” Kejriwal said, adding that the party had launched its own website for transparency.
Another component of the BJP’s ground-level micromanagement has been the character assassination, with all senior AAP leaders falling victim to the muckraking based on material provided by the ED/CBI. This was aided by the might of the organised media, especially the television channels, and social media that every day came out with more details about the scandals. The charge was led by Modi himself as he repeatedly invoked ‘Sheesh Mahal’, jacuzzi and ‘aap-da’ (catastrophe) in his campaign speeches.
P. Raman is a veteran journalist.