When he governs the entire country and has the power to disburse a Rs 50 lakh crore budget to states and persons more or less at will, why is the first thing that Narendra Modi does when he gets up every morning is looking for a new way to destroy the smallest national party in the country, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)?
The answer is that the intelligence and cunning that has brought him, a barely educated non-entity in 2001, to the pinnacle of power in India, has made him the first to recognise that the only political party that can dislodge him from power is Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP.
This is not because of its size, but the way in which he has based it upon serving the poor of Delhi (and therefore the country) first with absolutely no reference to caste, religion or community, and letting their increased earning, expenditure and work capacity filter upwards into greater production and sales by the rich.
This is the exact opposite of the way that every other political party, with only rare localised exceptions, has governed the country so far. For in all of them political power has been used to satisfy the backers of the winning parties first, and allow them to throw the dregs from their tables to those below.
This mode of development had already led to increased desperation among the poor, and especially the youth of the country, in the era of the planned economy. It improved briefly after economic liberalisation, from 1993 till 2011, when the youth gained a respite from growing hopelessness. But they were thrown back into despair by the joblessness that followed the raising of interest rates in the middle of a worldwide recession from 2010 onwards.
Modi came to power in 2014 mainly upon the back of that despair with wild promises to create 20 million jobs a year. Forty-two percent of the youth of the country, who had despaired of finding jobs after three consecutive years of relentless economic decline, believed him and voted for him.
This desperate hope was most visible in the voting pattern in the states of northern India. In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP’s vote jumped from 17.5% in 2009 to 42.2% in 2014 and 49.6% in 2019. In Rajasthan, it jumped from 36.6% in 2009 to 55.2% in 2014, and 59.1% in 2019. In Madhya Pradesh the BJP’s vote rose from 43% in 2009 to 54% in 2014 and 58% in 2019.
But after ten more years of slow growth and a rising unemployment that was more pronounced among educated youth, disillusionment had set in. In 2024, the BJP’s vote share fell by 8.2 percentage points (pp) in Uttar Pradesh and 9.5 pp in Rajasthan. Only in Madhya Pradesh did it rise marginally, but that was almost entirely because of the desertion of Jyotiraditya Scindia, with his family’s considerable feudal following, to the BJP in 2020.
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The BJP’s failure to meet any of Modi’s 2014 promises after being in power for an entire decade is the reason why the Indian electorate has begun to turn away from it.
Modi is fully aware that his party would have been ousted from power in 2024 had the Congress not peremptorily dismissed Nitish Kumar’s entreaty not to take Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra through Bihar, because it would at most transfer votes from the Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal to the Congress without in any way affecting the BJP.
Had the Congress heeded Kumar’s plea, the INDIA alliance would have won at least 35 out of Bihar’s 40 parliamentary seats, and would have been running the country today.
While the Congress has staunchly refused to learn anything from its gratuitous gift of power to the BJP, Modi has learned what could be the most important lesson of his life, to wit that the danger to the BJP and, given his murky past in Gujarat to him personally, comes not from a Congress that is bereft of ideas and leadership, but from the AAP’s powerful appeal to the poor of India.
As a result, in addition to trying to discredit the AAP’s moral credentials by harping on a supposed “liquor scam” for which it has not been able to find an iota of proof even after four years of ceaseless effort, it has turned to gerrymandering the Delhi elections in order to push the AAP out of power.
Modi’s government has prepared the ground for this by first destroying the carefully constructed independence of the Election Commission.
Tragically, since the Congress is no less an elitist in its approach to governance, it too has joined Modi’s campaign to destroy the AAP.
That is why, when Modi and his Sancho Panza Amit Shah resorted to unproven and unprovable allegations of corruption and money laundering against the AAP, destroyed habeas corpus (the most essential pillar of democracy, which is the right to remain free till proven guilty of a crime), and brazenly imprisoned the elected chief and deputy chief and other elected leaders, the Congress not only remained silent, but allowed its Delhi state leaders to join in Modi’s witch-hunt against the AAP.
As I write on the eve of the announcement of the results of the 2025 Delhi assembly elections, I have had time to reflect upon why Modi is so hell-bent upon destroying the smallest party in the country.
The short answer is that the AAP’s success in meeting the needs of the multitudinous poor is relentlessly exposing the elitism of both the Congress and the BJP, and showing the poor of India that, while one elite has hidden behind the mask of Gandhian secularism, another is now doing so behind that of Hindutva.
Both claim their allegiance to them on grounds that have relatively little to do with their future welfare.
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Modi’s government has spared no effort to destroy the AAP. Its unceasing effort to discredit the party’s leaders has been described above. But as the rock steady 53-54% vote share of the party in previous assembly elections has shown, they have failed to do so.
The BJP has therefore gone one step further and has, by some means that I have not been able to uncover, destroyed the AAP’s vote share in Delhi’s Lok Sabha elections.
I am aware that this is a serious accusation to make, but it is the only explanation one can think of for a huge difference that has repeatedly emerged between the AAP’s share of the assembly vote and in the Lok Sabha vote that has followed.
The AAP gained a record 54.3% of the vote in the 2015 assembly elections and 53% in the same election in 2020. These are almost certainly the highest vote shares that any political party fighting an election under the simple majority voting system anywhere in the world has ever obtained.
But in the Lok Sabha elections that followed these spectacular victories, the AAP’s share of the vote fell to 23% in 2019 and to 24.1% in 2024. These are falls of 58% and 55% respectively, and to say that they are unprecedented would be an understatement, because there has never been a similar decline in both here and any federal country in the world that has both national and state elections, and uses the simple majority voting system. These are the US, Canada and Australia.
Never in the 14 national elections that have been held after the Lok Sabha and assembly elections were separated in 1971 has there been a change of preference even remotely as huge as this.
To cite some examples, in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections of 2012, 2017 and 2022 that followed the Lok Sabha elections of 2009, 2014 and 2019, the difference between the BJP’s vote share in the two elections was 2.5 pp, 2.5 pp and 8.3 pp.
In Haryana where the two elections take place only months apart in the same year, the difference in the Congress’ share between the Lok Sabha and assembly polls was 6.7 pp in 2009, 2.5 pp in 2014, nil in 2019 and 4.6 pp in 2024.
In Madhya Pradesh, the difference in the Congress’s vote share between the Lok Sabha and the succeeding assembly elections was minus 3.62 pp between the Lok Sabha election of 2009 and the assembly election of 2013, plus 4.1 pp between Lok Sabha 2014 and assembly 2018, and again plus 5.9 pp between Lok Sabha 2019 and assembly 2023.
In Rajasthan, the difference between the BJP’s vote in the Lok Sabha election in 2009 and the assembly election four years later was 9.4 pp. It was 15.9 pp between Lok Sabha 2014 and assembly 2018, and 17 pp between Lok Sabha 2019 and assembly 2023.
In West Bengal, the difference between the Trinamool Congress’s vote in the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, 2014 and 2019 and the assembly elections held only two years later has been plus 7.7 pp, 5.1 pp and 4.3 pp.
In contrast to these five states that account for almost half of the country’s population, the drop in the AAP’s vote share between the assembly election of 2015 and the Lok Sabha election of 2019 was a mammoth 31.3 percentage points (from 54.3% to 23%), and a fall of 28.9 percentage points between the assembly election of 2020 and the Lok Sabha election of 2024.
The only explanation that I have been able to hazard for this incredible difference is that while in the assembly elections all those who live and work in Delhi have been listed diligently by the agents of the Election Commission, in the Lok Sabha elections only those whose permanent address is in Delhi have been so listed.
This would have disenfranchised all the migrant workers with no fixed abode in Delhi. In a city that has grown faster than almost any other in the world, this could easily be a third to a quarter of the population. Disenfranchising them is the only way in which such a result could have been obtained.
All this has been made possible a steady, step by step destruction of the independence of the Election Commission that has been described in detail, amongst others, by the British daily newspaper The Independent on April 18, 2024.
Today, a day before the 2025 assembly election results will be announced, we can only wait with bated breath to see whether the new Election Commission has found a way to apply the Lok Sabha rules to the assembly elections as well.
Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist. The figures in this article are the author’s calculations.