Congress, despite its ‘double bagel’ in 2015 and 2020, was always a contestant in Delhi right from the first poll
There may be multiple reasons why Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party he founded bit the dust after two commanding performances in elections to the Delhi Assembly in 2015 and 2020. However, the definitive reason for the 2025 verdict lay in the continuing presence of the Congress party in a three-cornered contest that suggested the grand old party may have wished to scupper AAP’s chances and thus delivered victory for the BJP.
Arvind Kejriwal, the giant slayer who unseated long-serving CM Sheila Dikshit in 2013, had also contributed to the common man deserting him by losing his original moorings as an anti-corruption crusader who promised to be the agent of change in Indian politics but who could not subjugate an overweening ambition to become a contender for the post of Prime Minister.
The albatross of corruption charges linked to a change in liquor policy was too big a burden and it did not help that he was mired in further controversy in doing up the chief minister’s residence into a luxurious “sheesh mahal” which was in shocking contrast to his driving his old Wagon R car symbolising his promise of simple living and high performance as a CM.
Congress, despite its ‘double bagel’ in 2015 and 2020, was always a contestant in Delhi right from the first polls. However, after the formation of the INDI alliance and an improved performance towards serving its aim of dethroning the ruling BJP-NDA, which it nearly did in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the party had to take a back seat in Delhi if it wished to keep the unity of the alliance alive.
The 14 seats in which the margin of victory and defeat was less than the votes polled by Congress candidates, including in Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia’s seats, told the story of how this election swung despite AAP’s vote share being an impressive 44 per cent to the BJP’s 46 per cent. The 7.5 per cent rise in vote share from 2020 was sufficient for the BJP to win 40 more seats for a landslide 48-22 victory that consolidates its winning sequence in Haryana and Maharashtra.
It is speculation that Congress intended this to put an ally prone to using the alliance only to its advantage in his place, but the open bickering in the campaign and the result might lead to fissures in INDIA that might be hard to seal. The discomfiture to the Congress caused by Mamata’s TMC and Akhilesh Yadav’s SP open support to Kejriwal might have sullied the waters more in an alliance that has been fighting an existential crisis so soon after the Lok Sabha Polls.
The non-performance in Delhi of the AAP, somewhat prone to playing the blame game against the Centre on all and sundry issues, was unduly testing the voters’ patience in the national capital overcome increasingly by pollution, rising mounds of garbage, flooding in the monsoon and traffic jams. Whatever good work was done in education, and public health might have been snowed under as competitive populism took centre stage into which the BJP also had to get into it, promising freebies which could test even Delhi’s finances.
Kejriwal’s outlandish charge of Haryana mixing poison in Yamuna water may not have helped either. And the middle class, bristling against inadequate service in utilities like clean tap water, may have found some solace in the budget wiping out tax liability in coming years. Even so, a ‘double engine’ government with the lieutenant governor on its side has its task cut out as Delhi aspires to be a better city than in 10 years of sclerotic rule.
