As the results for the Delhi Assembly elections poured in, I was reminded of a comment by the late Sushma Swaraj, the last BJP Chief Minister of Delhi. With the votes being counted in November 1998 at the peak of the onion price crisis, it became clear that the BJP was on its way out. Swaraj said, “Ghar ko aag lag gayee ghar ke chirag se (The house was burnt down by a lamp inside the house).” She was referring to the quarrels between various factions of the BJP, primarily with her immediate predecessor, Sahib Singh Verma. Ironically enough, it is the latter’s son who has defeated Arvind Kejriwal today, and the BJP is on its way back to power in Delhi.
The BJP has polled a little over 45 per cent of the votes, which is just about 2 percentage points more than the AAP. Congress, with just over 6 per cent of the votes, has emerged as the true spoiler in the election.
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Much like the 4 Ps of marketing, as formulated by Philip Kotler, electoral success, too, has four Ps — problem-solving, perception, party apparatus and peer leadership. In the eyes of the voter, problem-solving is the key to electoral sustenance. A voter consistently looks for solutions that can improve his or her quality of living. So, while some problems may have been solved, there are others that voters register as intractable, or where no or little headway is possible. In such cases, they either tend to assume all parties to be equally culpable, or give the benefit of the doubt to the Opposition.
Riding on the promise of anti-corruption, the AAP had built its identity on urban governance in its earlier terms. Clearly, however, on issues like pollution and the quality of drinking water, the party was almost as clueless as anyone else. This left elbow room for its opponents. The AAP had been voted to power on the assumption that it was a problem-solver; the moment it was stopped short by certain intractable issues, it was assumed to have lost its edge on one of the four Ps.
Problem-solving has to be central to a political machine, which can’t just rely on perception and party apparatus. While the AAP could match the BJP on perception, the latter has scored over the AAP with its party apparatus. It was also able to make Kejriwal out as one without peer leadership qualities, with the AAP being a single-leader party. That, in a nutshell, explains the final outcome of the election.
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The AAP is more or less down to the footprint it had in its debut election in 2013, confined to the central and eastern parts of Delhi. On the other hand, the fielding of Parvesh Verma against Kejriwal was a signal to Jats who, till the Haryana elections, were considered to be cold to the BJP. The BJP has made a clean sweep of western and northwestern Delhi, and large pockets of southern Delhi, where they are game-changers
Another segment that the BJP has won back is middle-class voters. That was a crucial chunk which had walked away from the BJP over the last two assembly elections, enamoured by Kejriwal’s promise of a cleaner politics. The South Delhi seats alone tell a story. Of the 15 seats here, the AAP has won only a handful of the 14 seats it had won last time. If the AAP had only managed to repeat its earlier success here, it would have managed to come within striking distance of power. The overall swing in favour of the BJP being 7 per cent tells the story, where a crucial tax-paying class has made all the difference. But then, what happened to the class that was to vote for AAP because of the freebies they received? There too experience teaches us that unless there is a consistent improvement in the quality of life, the voters don’t stick around.
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This is precisely the quandary that the regional parties in Tamil Nadu face. The Dravidian parties compete in dishing out all kinds of freebies, from mixer-grinders and colour TV sets to post-pregnancy kits. And, yet they have to alternate in power. The late J Jayalalithaa was able to beat anti-incumbency narrowly only once in 2016, which was her last election. Conversely, despite some of the worst accusations of corruption, both parties have managed to claw back power, as the voters have either discarded the most intractable problems from their mental to-do lists, or have held both to be equally responsible for leaving them unsolved.
Moreover, the vagaries of the first-past-the-post model often alter mandates at the seat level, where narrow margins can swing elections towards surprising results. The results to the Odisha Assembly in 2024 offer a classic example: The Biju Janata Dal had an uninterrupted run for almost 25 years, and even in its defeat its vote-share was a tad higher than the BJP’s. In Delhi, as of now, the vote-share difference between the BJP and AAP is narrow, indicating that the latter is not completely out of the race.
Going ahead, the AAP will need to look for a new USP. Unlike the BJP, which has a consistent narrative and a threshold quantum of voters that are aligned to it, for the AAP the journey has just begun. It’s a long road ahead to establish a robust, ideologically committed cadre like the BJP has. The BJP, on the other hand, now has the challenge of presenting itself as a party of urban governance, and showing that it can outdo AAP. It also has the challenge of consolidating middle-class voters nationwide to keep with itself a sliver of voters who can mean the difference between the treasury benches and the Opposition.
The writer is a political commentator and psephologist
