Battle for Delhi on Feb 5
Over 15.5 million Delhi voters will cast ballots on Feb 5 in high-stakes assembly elections amid governance issues, corruption allegations, and crime.
More than 15.5 million people across Delhi will vote in assembly elections on February 5, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced on Tuesday, laying the foundation for a high-voltage contest that will decide the future of the national capital.
The votes will be counted on February 8.
The elections will also be a crucial comment about governance in a city of 20 million people that has been caught in an acrimonious battle between two divergent power centres and wracked by crumbling infrastructure, civic decay and a string of gang-related crimes.
“Delhi symbolises diversity, with people from various states and cultures residing here. This diversity increases the responsibility of Delhiites. I hope ‘Dilli Dil Se Vote Karegi (Delhi will vote from the heart’),” said chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar.
All 70 of Delhi’s assembly segments will vote in a single phase and the incumbent Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will look to retain power for a third straight term, after two unprecedented sweeps in the 2015 and 2020 elections, when it won 67 and 62 seats respectively. However, it has been beleaguered by corruption allegations and the arrests of its brass, including former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, who made way for senior minister Atishi in September and has set up the upcoming polls as a referendum about his honesty and governance model.
The AAP will have to fend off the charge of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was relegated to three and eight seats in the previous two elections respectively, and has not ruled the Capital since Sushma Swaraj’s brief term in 1998. However, the party won all seven Lok Sabha seats in the city in the 2024 and 2019 assembly elections.
The Congress, which under former chief minister Sheila Dikshit ruled Delhi for three straight terms between 1998 and 2013, will look to regain some of its foothold in a city that once seemed to be an impenetrable fortress for other political parties. The party blanked in the 2015 and 2020 election cycles and last had a presence in the Vidhan Sabha only in 2013, when it won eight seats and formed an ill-fated coalition government with the AAP.
Kumar said around 100,000 personnel will fan out across the city and voters will cast their ballot in 13,033 booths.
AAP chief Kejriwal said voters will “decide between the politics of work and the politics of abuse”.
“The people of Delhi will have faith in our politics of work. We will definitely win,” he wrote on X.
Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva said “this time, the lotus will bloom in Delhi”.
“Delhi will get a double engine government under the leadership of PM Modi,” he said.
Congress in-charge for Delhi Qazi Nizamuddin said, “The party is fully ready for the election.”
“We have announced the ‘Pyari Didi Yojana’ under which we will provide ₹2,500 per month to our sisters. We have implemented such schemes in states where there is Congress government,” he said.
The elections will bookend a bruising five years for the national capital, which has been beset by communal strife, crime, infrastructure collapse and a beleaguered government embattled by a raft of corruption charges that it has vehemently denied.
Governance of the national capital is split between the elected state government, which is in charge of all areas except land, law and order (known as reserved subjects), which are in turn under the Centre’s control. However, the city has suffered across these fronts.
Trouble ballooned days after the 2020 elections. Northeast Delhi erupted in violence on February 23, 2020, following clashes between Hindus and Muslims over the then proposed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that left 53 dead and over 700 injured. Weeks later, a national lockdown to stem the spread of Covid-19 shut the city down, even as waves of the pandemic infected millions and killedover 26,000.
And even as the city seemed to heal from those gashes, a seemingly ceaseless tussle for control of the city’s administration widened over the five years.
In 2023, the Supreme Court stamped the elected Delhi government’s power to appoint and transfer bureaucrats in the Capital in all areas except three (land, police and public order). However, the Centre essentially reversed that ruling in ordinance days later, later signing the amended Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD) Act into law on May 19, 2023.
The Capital has had three lieutenant governors, who are appointed by the Centre, in 10 years – Najeeb Jung, Anil Baijal and VK Saxena -- and the acrimony between Raj Bhavan and the elected government has snowballed after the latter took charge in May 2022.
Saxena’s office and the AAP government have clashed on nearly every policy issue over the past two years, including the controversial 2021 Delhi excise policy, alleged irregularities in building hospitals, cleaning the Yamuna and, most recently, over two poll promises for senior citizens and women the party made.
The new excise policy, in particular, became an albatross around the AAP’s neck. An investigation into the policy led to allegations of corruption in the formulation and implementation of the regime that rocked the foundations of a party that was borne out of the 2011 anti-graft movement.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) raided several AAP ministers and leaders in connection with the case – including Kejriwal, former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh. AAP member Vijay Nair was also arrested in connection with the proceedings.
To be sure, the hearings are still on in the matter and all of them have been released on bail, following sharp comments from courts over the delay in investigation. However, opposition parties have used the cases to target the AAP.
At the same time, the AAP and BJP have been locked in a furious battle over renovations made to the 6, Flag Staff Road bungalow that Kejriwal lived in between 2015 and 2024. The bungalow was then allotted to Atishi, but the Delhi Public Works Department (PWD) rescinded that allocation on Tuesday. The BJP has alleged that Kejriwal spent ₹80 crore on renovating the bungalow, labelling the house “sheesh mahal (shimmering palace)”. Kejriwal and his party have dismissed the claims.
Delhi has also been rocked by a string of high-profile crimes, especially involving the city’s infamous gangs. These include the grisly murder of 64-year-old Rohit Kumar at his Panchsheel Park residence, the murder of 52-year old businessman Sunil Jain while returning from a morning walk in Shahdara, a shoot-out at a Burger King outlet in Rajouri garden which led to one person’s death.
And, as governance appeared to take a back seat, nobody has suffered more than the average Delhi resident. The city’s infrastructure has, especially since last year, buckled under the pressure of an ever-growing population and under the weight of being the centre of the National Capital Region (NCR). Rains wreaked havoc, with more than 50 people dying across the city -- some in open drains, others by electrocution. Notably, three UPSC aspirants lost their lives in July 2024, when they got trapped in the basement of a coaching centre in Rajendra Nagar that flooded during heavy rains.
All the while, Delhi has breathed toxic air, year after year, with pollution levels spiralling to new records in 2024, with few deep remedies in sight, even as rampant green law violations made the news.