After a seven-phase general election and a series of assembly polls this year, the never-ending Indian poll cycle is set to kick off again, as early as February in Delhi.
While the fight in Delhi is for just 70 seats, the election is still a high-stake game for all contenders given how important the messaging from the national capital can be. The state being Aam Aadmi Party’s sturdiest stronghold, which makes this election all the more significant, even if to form a government with limited powers.
Riding on the back of the results of the last two assembly polls, AAP seems upbeat about its performance in the upcoming elections. It has even refused to ally with its INDIA bloc partner Congress. However, the party needs to pay attention to several key issues to ensure a smooth path to a third term in office.
Several top AAP leaders, including party chief and former CM Kejriwal, face a slew of corruption charges. The barrage of graft allegations, coupled with strict bail conditions on party supremo, even forced the party to replace Kejriwal and install Atishi as a stopgap chief minister. This recalibration is part of its poll strategy aimed at retaining power next year.
However, here also lies an opportune opening for the BJP and the Congress to aim their guns at AAP. The party’s shift from being a “disruptor” to a mainstream political actor was already marked in the 2020 assembly polls.
The party’s anti-corruption image has further been dented by its alleged mishandling of governance issues. AAP has come under fire from several corners on mismanagement of the water crises, garbage disposal, waterlogging only fueling the growing disdain over crippled state of civic amenities in the capital. The dismal state of civic governance comes at a time when the party is in power in Delhi’s municipal bodies as well.
AAP’s strategy to counter such criticism has been to blame the centre-appointed Lieutenant Governor’s office for not letting the Delhi government and civic bodies work with a free hand. The intensity of the centre-Delhi government tussle had never reached such a scale in the capital where the LG office has always been part of the governance machinery.
Even if AAP’s core supporters may support attributing misgovernance to LG interference, it doesn’t cut much ice with all sections of voters. The party doesn’t miss any opportunity to claim credit for every achievement by the Delhi government and civic bodies, but is quick to shift blame to the LG office for all its failings. This selective ownership of governance issues comes across as politically motivated move to many.
Despite such challenges, there are several factors that can give AAP a leg-up in the polls.
What works in the AAP’s favour
The party could expect to make several gains from Delhi’s special character of opting for different choices exercised in the national and assembly polls. Even as AAP failed to win any of the seven seats in Delhi in 2024 parliamentary polls, all of which were won by the BJP, it knows a section of the electorate votes for it in assembly polls although it chooses its key rival in general elections.
Dolling out ‘freebies’ under several welfare schemes with a strong party network to spread the word on the benefits is a combination that could also come handy for the party to buck any anti-incumbency trend. This plan seems to have worked in many states with several incumbent governments getting voted back to power. AAP is also counting on measures like provision of free electricity, water and bus rides to women and its workers’ network to retain votes from its core base.
Such designs are largely dependent on parties building a structure of “charitable state”, to borrow political commentator Hilal Ahmed’s phrase, rather than building a welfare architecture. Whatever the intentions, such actions have proved to bring a decisive section of transactional electoral support to the party in the past.
The party also reckons that the arrest of its top leaders may also bring a degree of ‘sympathy vote’ as part of a backlash against what it terms as a ‘witchhunt’ by the BJP-led central government. Electoral politics in India is replete with a number of examples, most recently in Jharkhand, when instead of punishing leaders charged with corruption, a loyal voter base has turned up at polling booths to return them to power. Attributing political motives to the corruption charges, AAP has been working on leveraging this ‘sympathy vote’ for the last few months.
Given this backdrop, the BJP’s campaign is geared towards targeting AAP’s missteps and the allegations levelled against them. The ongoing series of nukkad sabhas aimed at attacking the incumbent government is part of its campaign that would be intensified over the next eight weeks. The saffron party will hope to streamline its campaign in a way that any rise in the vote share also translates into a proportional increase in the number of assembly seats. In the 2020 assembly polls, BJP received 38.5 percent votes winning eight seats, compared to 32.1 percent votes in 2015 when it won three seats.
At the same time, Congress, which under Sheila Dikshit headed three successive governments in Delhi, is still struggling to define a clear polls strategy. Its Delhi unit had not been on the same page with the party’s national top brass about allying with AAP in the Lok Sabha. Veteran leaders from the Delhi unit such as Ajay Maken do not echo the party leadership’s approach of showing solidarity with AAP for being targeted by the centre. Instead Delhi unit leaders have been vocal in slamming the AAP government over corruption charges and misgovernance.
The Congress is also likely to aim its efforts at recovering some sections of support base in the capital. The party would do well not to repeat what happened in 2020, when despite contesting polls, its campaign was almost invisible on the ground. Now the party’s Delhi unit’s politics majorly hinges on whether its leader can decouple INDIA bloc ties from the intricacies of party rivalry in the national capital.
In the next few weeks, the tone and tenor of the poll campaigns in Delhi are likely to unfold the local-national fusion, mirroring how an essentially local thrust ends up disproportionately hogging national political attention. The bipolarity of the contest has been drawn between incumbent AAP and the BJP, its key challenger. But, it remains to be seen whether Congress can still make it a triangular fight in a considerable number of constituencies, if not all. In that case, the nature of party competition in the capital would open up a different set of configurations.
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