BJP shatters Kejri wall: AAP falls in Delhi elections
BJP wins Delhi elections, ending AAP's decade-long rule with 48 seats. AAP faces existential crisis amid anti-incumbency and corruption issues.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday broke a 27-year-old jinx to storm to power in the Capital with a two-thirds majority, trouncing the Aam Aadmi Party in the year’s first electoral contest that will have deep reverberations on national politics.
The BJP won 48 out of Delhi’s 70 seats on the back of a grounded campaign that eschewed incendiary rhetoric to amplify grassroots disenchantment with crumbling infrastructure and faltering civic services, ending the 10-year-long rule of the AAP.
Buckling under the weight of anti-incumbency, corruption allegations and frustration about stalled development works, the AAP shed nearly two-thirds of its 2020 tally of 62, winning just 22 seats in elections that became a referendum on the party and its chief, Arvind Kejriwal.
The Congress emerged as a marginal third player with zero seats – the third consecutive assembly elections when it has failed to open its account in a city it ruled for 15 years – but it damaged the AAP in 12 seats and contributed to the losses of heavyweights such as Kejriwal from New Delhi and former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia from Jangpura.
The impressive victory is only the second time the BJP has won assembly elections in the Capital. It won Delhi’s first assembly elections in 1993 but has never returned to power after its government was bundled out over soaring onion prices in 1998. Its 2025 triumph was underlined by a decisive shift of a large chunk of middle-class support due to tax breaks in the Union budget and unkept poll promises by the previous administration.
The AAP, which emerged from the cauldron of the anti-corruption protest in 2012 and used the national capital as a cradle, crashed to its lowest tally as it atrophied support among the middle classes that were angry about the governance dysfunction that crippled Delhi in recent years.
Only a handful of party leaders – outgoing chief minister Atishi, outgoing minister Gopal Rai, and senior leader Sanjeev Jha – survived the waves of support in favour of the BJP that helped former MP Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma defeat Kejriwal in the latter’s pocket borough of New Delhi by 4,000 votes and also felled at least twositting cabinet ministers. To be sure, the elections were far tighter in terms of vote share – where the difference between the two sides was only 3.6%.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the BJP victory historic. “Delhi has been freed from the ‘AAP-da’. The mandate of Delhi is clear. Today, development, vision and trust have won in Delhi. Aadambar, Arajakta, Ahankar aur AAP-da ki haar hui hai (ostentation, anarchy, arrogance and disaster have lost),” he said at the BJP headquarters, swapping the name of the AAP with the Hindi word for disaster, something he first coined during the assembly elections campaign.
Kejriwal issued a sombre video address where he conceded defeat in elections that he had hoped would make him chief minister of Delhi for a fourth full term and bolster his profile as a national leader. “We fought a good election… We will play the role of constructive opposition but will also be available to people of Delhi,” he said.
The battle for Delhi is the first major electoral battle for 2025 and will fortify the BJP’s claim as the national political hegemon after the setback of the 2024 general elections when it failed to secure a full majority on its own. With an unexpected win in Haryana, a landslide victory in Maharashtra, and now a two-thirds majority in Delhi, the BJP has managed to wrest the political momentum and is now set to use this to push through big-ticket policy proposals and set the political agenda for the year.
In contrast, the results are a sobering wake-up call for the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) that has lurched from defeats in Haryana and Maharashtra to now, Delhi, and appears to be in disarray – especially after two constituents of the bloc, the AAP and the Congress, fought separately in the Capital, squabbled incessantly and ended up damaging each other’s prospects.
“We humbly accept the mandate of Delhi. Heartfelt thanks to all the Congress workers of the state for their dedication and all the voters for their support,” he said in his post in Hindi…This fight for the progress of Delhi and the rights of Delhiites – against pollution, price rise and corruption – will continue,” Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said.
For the AAP, the drubbing represents an existential crisis as the fledgling party will sit in opposition for the first time in a decade. The loss showed the party that its signature campaign centred on welfare delivery and Kejriwal’s appeal received tepid response and was not enough to tide over the simmering anger over anti-incumbency. Now shorn of its anti-corruption veneer and with its national ambitions dashed for the time being, the party will have to go back to the drawing board with an emaciated presence in the Delhi assembly.
The Congress will also likely find that knives are out within the INDIA bloc from powerful allies that appear unhappy. The party struggled to make a mark on the poll campaign and failed to convince a significant-enough population to consider it a viable choice, but increased its vote share by around two percentage points – scant consolation for a party that once set the agenda for the Capital between 1998 and 2013.
Despite the modest size of the electorate, Delhi has always commanded outsized heft on the national political stage due to the prestige associated with ruling the Capital and the fact that its population reflects the diversity of broader national demographics.
But over the past five years, unprecedented acrimony between the elected state government and the lieutenant governor derailed local governance and plunged the Capital into a morass of toxic air, crumbling infrastructure, rising crime and policy dysfunction.
The AAP won landslide victories in 2015 and 2020 but spent the better part of the past five years battling corruption allegations that sent virtually its entire frontline leadership behind bars. The party sought to focus on its central welfare plank by offering a bouquet of 16 sops ranging from cash handouts to poor women to free treatment for all senior citizens. It also sought to blunt anti-incumbency by dropping nearly a third of its incumbent lawmakers and challenging the opponents to come up with an alternative with its main face, Kejriwal.
But the final results showed that the BJP’s strategy of matching the AAP’s welfare outreach, stripping it of its halo of incorruptibility, while hammering it on civic decay had caught the city’s pulse. In a largely bipolar contest, the electorate was found to be sharply divided by class; the middle-class neighbourhoods in south and west Delhi expressed disappointment with the AAP’s lack of tangible governance over the past five years by switching en-masse to the BJP, while lower-income neighbourhoods and slum clusters stuck to the AAP and prevented a complete wipeout.
Tensions gripped the Capital from 8am as electronic voting machines were opened, leading to see-sawing trends on high-profile seats such as New Delhi, Jangpura, Kalkaji, Okhla, Sangam Vihar and Madipur. The BJP leapt ahead in early trends but around noon, the AAP was hovering around the 30-seat mark and appearing to be putting up a fight. But soon after as leaders such as Sisodia conceded defeat by a margin of a few hundred votes, it became clear that Saturday will herald the beginning of a new political era in the Capital.
