Sumanth Raman
In the end, it was not as keenly contested an election as it appeared to be in the early part of the counting. The landslide win of the Aam Aadmi party in the Delhi Assembly election came as little surprise to those who expected the Arvind Kejriwal-led outfit to make use of its governance record to score against BJP.
With the Congress virtually throwing up its hands, it was a straight fight between AAP and BJP. And AAP won what can be termed in many ways a landmark verdict.
To repeat their 2015 performance when they won 67 out of the 70 seats was possibly too much for even the AAP leadership to have hoped for. But bagging 62 seats after five years in office and that too campaigning purely on the record of its government was a stupendous feat. There will always be debates on how much the implosion of the Congress helped the AAP, but it is clear to the most unbiased observer that even if the Congress had tried, the result would not have been very different.
For AAP, all its known faces won. Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, Atishi, Raghav Chadha, Gopal Rai, Saurabh Bharadwaj and the controversial Amanatullah Khan made it to the finish line though Atishi and Sisodia were pushed a lot more than they may have wished. AAP lost just eight seats, but more importantly, it retained its vote share of 54 percent in the national capital.
For BJP in general and Home Minister Amit Shah in particular, the result must be galling. Shah was virtually the face of the campaign going street to street and addressing dozens of meetings. Shah’s and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's strategy to make Shaheen Bagh protests the centre piece of their campaign may have been necessitated by the absence of a presentable face to match Kejriwal. That’s also in part due to the BJP-controlled MCD (Municipal Corporation of Delhi), which has nothing much to show.
But BJP's relentless and vitriolic campaign that sought to demonise those at Shaheen Bagh seems to have been summarily rejected by the Delhi voter. Even as the writing was on the wall, BJP pulled out everything, even pressing into the campaign dozens of its ministers and MPs, to mobilise vote. It simply did not work.
With the Congress being decimated and its vote share dropping to an all-time low of 4 percent, the grand old party is facing questions on how to arrest its shrinking footprint. Sixty-seven of the Congress candidates lost their deposits in a state they ruled for 15 years less than two decades ago.
The Delhi verdict is unlikely to have a major impact on the national politics beyond giving the Opposition further evidence that BJP can be beaten if there is a credible face at the state level. Kejriwal has enhanced his stature across the country and while it is too early to speculate about him being a PM contender against Modi in 2024, there is little doubt that he will look to spread his wings at least to nearby states like Punjab. Kejriwal showed himself to be a canny politician refusing to rise to the Shaheen Bagh bait, sidestepping the issue neatly. He also carefully avoided taking on Modi during the campaign.
The next big electoral test will be in Bihar a few months down the line. Will the Delhi experience make the BJP go slow on the polarisation theme there or is this model here to stay? In Delhi though, the muffler man has humbled the Goliath of a party machine. As the headlines said, Jan Ki Baat trumped Mann ki Baat.
Sumanth Raman is a Chennai-based television anchor and political analyst. Views are personal.
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