Delhi MCD Elections: BJP win shows it’s unstoppable now that AAP threat is crumbling

Supporters of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) celebrate after learning of the initial poll results outside the party headquarters in New Delhi, India, March 11, 2017. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi - RTX30K45

The results of the Delhi municipal corporation elections have a resonance far beyond the gullies of Daryaganj: They underline the unstoppability of the Bharatiya Janata Party nationally because they could spell the end of its most potent challenge.

It may appear grandiose to term the 4-year-old Aam Aadmi Party as a threat to a lotus in full bloom, but scan the political horizon and it’s clear that AAP, warts and all, is the only party that was capable of at least being a nuisance to the BJP. Until today, where the AAP’s inability to dislodge its rival from the corporations is a body blow to its ambitions.

The BJP takes AAP very seriously. An inordinate amount of management time has gone into crushing Kejriwal, and that’s not just because he dealt the party a humiliating defeat, not once, but twice, in Delhi.

If you wish to gauge how worried the BJP has been about AAP, you need only to look at the output of the BJP-supporting troll army on Twitter and other social media. The vehemence of their tone when dealing with Kejriwal was in direct proportion to their fear of him.

What made Kejriwal – tamasha, nautanki, outrageous statements and all – a worry for the BJP? Well, he was a bit too much like them.

He mastered the politics of agitation – the well-choreographed anti-corruption movement with Anna Hazare or the ridiculous dharna outside Rail Bhavan as a sitting CM were his equivalents of LK Advani’s rath yatra. He was disruptive; he knew how to use social media and he understood how to corner media space.

Now, there have been two setbacks – Punjab, where Kejriwal’s colourful turbans did little for him, and Delhi, where he finds himself sandwiched between perennially hostile lieutenant governors and now, fresh hordes of BJP corporators.

The message that the BJP would like to give Kejriwal is:  You can’t hold your own little bastion, don’t even think of taking us on anywhere else.

Kejriwal’s rant about voting machine fraud and whatever else his febrile imagination comes up with are a bit of a distraction; what might be more interesting is the ‘movement’ he was talking of starting if the exit polls came true. That might be his only hope: A return to the streets, a return to the drawing board and a long – very long – pause to his national ambitions. Losing Delhi at the next assembly elections would be the final nail in a coffin that’s now only slightly ajar.

As for the BJP, it has won every significant election since demonetisation, starting with the Maharashtra local bodies and culminating in Uttar Pradesh, where PM Narendra Modi’s pick for the top job, Yogi Adityanath, has done nothing to disappoint. True, it lost Punjab, which it could put down to having a deeply unpopular local ally; but even there, there was the satisfaction of seeing Kejriwal eating the dust.

The juggernaut is truly rolling. Karnataka and Gujarat await elections and 2019 is looking like a slam-dunk, even if party president Amit Shah and others are probably hard at work already.  All this will bring joy to markets, which love the BJP, adore certainty and cherish the notion that seven years more of BJP rule may be that certainty.