Gujarat Elections 2022: AAP’s entry spoilt Congress’ chances in several seats

AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal. (File image)

Although the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)  won’t be forming the government in Gujarat, as its national convenor Arvind Kejriwal had said that it would, it has surely managed to place itself as the third-biggest party in Gujarat, the numbers show. This provides it ground to improve its prospects in the 2027 elections.

The party won five seats in Gujarat this time, securing a vote share of 12.92 percent in total. In fact, in Dediyapada constituency, where AAP’s Chaitarbhai Vasava won, it got more than 55 percent votes. More than half of the vote share of the party came from just 38 of the 181 seats it contested. Out of the five seats it won, four were rural constituencies, while one was semi-rural.

Despite winning a low number of seats, the silver lining for AAP will be that it is all set to be recognised as a national party as it required just two seats and 6 percent vote share in Gujarat to attain that status.

Out of the five seats that the AAP secured in this election, two each were wrested from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress, respectively, and one from the Bharatiya Tribal Party.

An analysis of election data shows that the party came second in as many as 34 seats in the state. In these seats, the AAP got an average vote share of 26.3 percent, while the average margin between AAP candidates and the winning candidates stood at 48,221 votes.

The party managed to garner an average vote share of 9.92% in the 111 seats where it finished third. In these seats, the average margin between the AAP and the party that came second stood at around 35,808 votes. Interestingly, in five seats, the margin between the AAP and the second-placed party was less than 2000.

Importantly, in at least 30 seats in which the party finished second, it was the Congress that suffered as it was pushed to the third spot.

In 39 of the seats that the Congress lost, the AAP got more votes than the margin of victory. This means that the number of votes that both these parties got together was more than that of the winner. In fact, the AAP seem to have had a direct impact in the vote share of Congress in several constituencies, as shown in the table below.

However, for a majority of the AAP candidates in Gujarat, the election was a disappointment. In 126 out of the 181 constituencies the party contested, its candidates lost their deposit. This means that their vote share was less than 16.66 percent.

The party got less than 5 percent of votes in another 53 constituencies, while in five of those, its vote share did not cross 1 percent. Further, in 15 constituencies, the NOTA or ‘none of the above’ category notched up a higher number than the AAP candidate.