NEW DELHI, Feb. 8 -- Ending its political drought of 27 years, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday returned to power in Delhi, sweeping the Assembly polls and blowing away the Arvind Kejriwal-led ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which was eyeing a fourth-term.
In a closely fought election, the BJP bagged 48 out of 70 Assembly seats while the AAP could post victory on 22 seats. The Congress continued with its hat-trick of drawing a blank, according to results declared by the Election Commission of India.
Riding on the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'AAP-da'(disaster) blitzkrieg, the BJP handed down an ignominious defeat to AAP's bigwigs, including former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, his former deputy Manish Sisodia and former minister Satyender Jain. Only saving grace for the AAP was victory of chief minister Atishi from Kalkaji seat by a margin of 3,521 votes over BJP's former MP Ramesh Bidhuri.
Kejriwal's close aides Somnath Bharti from Malviya Nagar and Saurabh Bhardwaj from Greater Kailash were also defeated by the BJP candidates Satish Upadhyaya and Shikha Rai respectively. Kejriwal's defeat at the hands of BJP's Parvesh Verma in the New Delhi seat by a margin of 4,089 votes was a stunning blow. Sandeep Dikshit, former MP and son of former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, finished a distant third with 4,568 votes.
While BJP's vote share went up by 7.92 per cent to 47.3 per cent, AAP witnessed a fall of 9.72 per cent and settled at 43.9 per cent vote share. The Congress improved by 2.18 per cent and registered a vote share of 6.4 per cent. The BJP's vote share has steadily grown from over 32 per cent in 2015 to 38.5 per cent in 2020 against the AAP's over 54 per cent and 53.5 per cent respectively.
The elections were largely seen as a bipolar contest between the AAP, and the challenger BJP. While the AAP had 62 members in the outgoing Assembly, the saffron party had eight legislators. The Congress, which had ruled for 15 consecutive years under Sheila Dikshit from 1998, came a cropper in the Assembly elections. Its candidates suffered crushing defeats with a majority of them even losing their deposits
For the BJP, the sound of electoral victory in Delhi will certainly ring across the country as Delhi remains prestigious centre of power as India's national Capital and help BJP extend its footprint, fading to some extent the reverses it suffered in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections where it won 240 seats, falling short of the majority mark of 272.
Addressing party workers at the BJP headquarters where he was flanked by Home Minister Amit Shah and party president J P Nadda, Prime Minister Modi said people of Delhi have shown the door to 'AAP-da' and now a 'double-engine' government will ensure development at a double speed.
"I thank all Delhiites for entrusting their faith in 'Modi ki guarantee'," Modi said in his address from party headquarters in the evening.
The BJP not only hijacked and improved upon the AAP's campaign of distributing freebies to the people, the party launched a hyper-local campaign focussing on ground level issues such as water, drainage, lack of infrastructure, poor roads and water logging as well as polluted Yamuna and distressing air pollution.
The BJP also aggressively attacked Kejriwal for corruption in the excise policy and for 'sheesh mahal' for the lavishly renovated chief minister's residence.
For Kejriwal, the AAP national convenor, who rode high on an anti-corruption plank in 2012 which led to the formation of the party, his electoral innings ended in despair. He lost by 4,089 votes to BJP's Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma, former two-time MP and son of former Delhi chief minister Sahib Singh Verma.
"The new chief minister will be decided by the party's central leadership," said Verma who emerged as a giant killer for defeating Kejriwal in the New Delhi constituency. The BJP had not projected a CM face in the poll campaign.
The loss in Delhi where it ruled for the past 10 years consecutively, means that the party is reduced only to Punjab as it suffered a crushing blow to its national ambitions.
The 2025 Assembly result in Delhi was a dramatic downturn for the AAP, which had won 67 of the 70 seats in 2015, wiping out both the Congress and the BJP and 62 seats in 2020.
The BJP ruled Delhi between 1993 and 1998 when the party had three chief ministers--Madan Lal Khurana, Sahib Singh Verma and Sushma Swaraj. The BJP's vote share has steadily grown from over 32 per cent in 2015 to 38.5 per cent in 2020 against the AAP's over 54 per cent and 53.5 per cent respectively.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.