Delhi Election 2020: How AAP romped home

Analysing Delhi Outcome

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) under Arvind Kejriwal has retained power in Delhi. The party has almost repeated its spectacular Assembly election performance in 2015, hardly conceding space to its rivals in the new Assembly. As such, even before the vote count on Tuesday, the victory of AAP was not really in doubt. It is, however, arguably, whether the party would have scored such a massive victory if its rivals had not erred in their approaches to electioneering.

A closer look at the Delhi voting patterns indeed validates that AAP would have retained power without any serious challenge from its rivals. But the victory would have been a less emphatic one, but for the fact that the BJP and Congress – its principal rivals – left the AAP alone, as if the battle was just between themselves. For the BJP, its 7-out-of-7 parliamentary poll victory in the national capital last May appeared to have convinced the saffron leadership of at least a good Assembly election showing. And for Congress, the Lok Sabha election results – the party finished runner-up in five Lok Sabha seats to AAP’s two seats – seem to have been enough to conclude that the party had revived itself back to strength, relegating AAP to the third position in Delhi’s triangular contest. But the Lok Sabha polling pattern mattered little in the Assembly polls.

Leaving behind its parliamentary poll debacle, the AAP campaign sold its leader and the AAP government’s welfare and populist policies to the targeted constituencies of the weaker sections, minorities, the middle class, and youth and women, in particular. The party adopted a circumspect stand on the most talked-about issue of Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). This, at times, prompted the Congress to question Kejriwal over his silence on CAA, whereas the BJP and Congress battled it out on issues such as CAA. While the BJP chose to play up its Hindu card, Congress highlighted its minority Muslim card, leaving the AAP’s campaign unchallenged. It did not help the two parties that they also lacked local leaders to match Kejriwal’s appeal among the voters.

The voters, as a result, appear to have stayed away from the divisive CAA-centric campaign of BJP and Congress, and endorsed AAP’s moderate, issue-centric campaign.

Thus, when the results came out on Tuesday, the poll battle did not even live up to its pre-poll billing as a triangular contest. With the Congress completely marginalised, the contest ended up as an unequal, direct one between AAP and BJP. A huge 15.1% gap in vote share separated the winner from the runner-up – 53.6% vote share of AAP to BJP’s 38.5%. Congress was nowhere near, with 4.26%, down from its 9.7% share in 2015.

In a normal election, a favourable swing of 6.2%, which is what the BJP managed over its 2015 vote share of 32.3%, should have helped a leading opposition party either to dethrone the ruling party or, at least, come close to doing so. But the BJP managed neither. An analysis of the early available poll data suggests that the BJP’s vote share has increased at AAP’s cost, as the party seemed to have regained some of its traditional supporters among Delhi’s Partition-time migrant communities, upper castes, and middle class people who had supported AAP in 2015.

Thus, arithmetically, the BJP’s gain of 6.2% should have proportionally brought down AAP’s tally from its 2015 share of 54.3%. However, AAP dropped just 0.7% over its 2015 tally. It appears to have almost made up for its losses to the BJP by gaining new support from Congress, from amongst the weaker sections and the Muslim minorities, who have been a traditional support base of Congress.

Data on voting patterns indeed corroborate that the BJP gained from the AAP, and AAP from Congress. Out of the 70 seats in the Assembly, there are 22 constituencies which have large Muslim and Dalit presence. Of these, 12 are reserved for Scheduled Castes and the remaining 10 are seats where Muslims constitute 30-40% of voters. The AAP won every single of these 22 seats, actually wresting one from the BJP.

Further, in the 22 seats, AAP recorded a massive 22.03% advantage over the BJP. This is significantly higher than its overall advantage of 15.1% in the 70 seats. And Congress’ vote share in these 22 seats, contrary to the party leadership’s expectations, is significantly lower than its overall tally of 4.26%.

More to the point, the BJP’s vote share in the 22 seats is almost 3% lower than its overall 38.5% vote share. In other words, AAP ruled in these seats with its vote share, which is over 4% higher than its overall vote share across Delhi. Needless to say, Congress lost more of what was left of its traditional support base.

That the BJP gained at AAP’s cost in 48 other seats in the state is also established by the fact that its gap with AAP in these seats is 11.83%. While this gap is high, it compares better with the overall gap of 15.1% and the gap of over 22% in the 22 seats with large Muslim and Dalit presence. Significantly, AAP’s vote share in these 48 seats is lower than its overall tally for Delhi – 51.57% as against 53.6%. There wasn’t much for the Congress even in these seats, though all the three-party candidates who retained their deposit were in this category of seats.

Interestingly, of the three seats in which the Congress retained deposits, the BJP won one and lost another by a relatively small margin. Perhaps, these were the only three seats that witnessed some kind of a triangular contest this time.

(The writer is a former Associate Editor of Deccan Herald)