Rajouri Garden By-poll Results & MCD Election

Generally, political pundits don’t give much importance to assembly/Lok Sabha by-poll results. Today the results of bypoll of 10 assembly seats across 8 states has been declared. As usual ruling parties have won seats in MP, Rajasthan, WB and Karnataka. But the real shocking result has come from Rajouri Garden seat Garden sear in Delhi. BJP candidate got 40,602 votes while Congress candidate secured 25,950 votes. The ruling AAP secured just 10,243 votes.

There have been many instances in the past when ruling party has lost assembly by-polls, but this result is shocking by any standard. AAP had won 67 seats out of 70 just 2 years ago. BJP was humiliated with 3 seats and Congress was totally wiped out. But it seems both national parties have recovered well. The most interesting part is that Congress is reviving in Delhi. Even last year’s MCD by-polls showed that the condition of Congress is way better than 2015 assembly election. It is a sweet victory for BJP after 2013 humiliation. The MCD poll is just 2 weeks away and today’s result may be a mental set-back for AAP. But still the MCD poll battle is far from over. But one thing is clear that the MCD election will not be bipolar election. Congress may come back strongly in MCD. BJP has been ruling MCD for 15 years so it will have to face anti-incumbency. AAP is constantly trying to take advantage of the anti-incumbency faced by BJP. In past 15 years, Delhi used to vote Congress in assembly and BJP in MCD. AAP is fighting with full strength and BJP has dropped all of its sitting corporators. So we may be heading into another cracker municipal election in Delhi.

Let us come back to Rajouri Garden seat. It has been a Bastian of Congress & Ajay Makan in past. BJP’s partner SAP won it in 2013 and AAP won it in 2015. The winning margin for AAP in 2015 was roughly around 14,700. AAP’s Jarnail Sing has won the seat but he vacated the seat to contest against then Punjab CM Prakash Singh Badal. AAP says that voters were angry that Jarnail Sing left the seat and went to Punjab to contest the election. This logic may have some merit but this doesn’t explain the loss of vote share from 52% to 13%. There may be many local factors involved but this result clearly point out the fact that AAP’s popularity is not same as it was 2 years ago. AAP had many pre-poll promises in 2015 and they claim that they have fulfilled most of the promises. But opposition party says that most of the promises still remain on promises. AAP leadership spent more than 2 months in Punjab fighting assembly election there and it seems that they may have neglected Delhi. Also, AAP has always been in confrontation mode with Centre & Modi. They blame every little failure of AAP on Modi. Even Modi’s arch rivals like Nitish & Mamta don’t confront Modi on daily basis. If you look at the twitter handle of top AAP leaders, you will find Modi’s or BJP’s name feature in their tweets almost daily.

The most worrying thing for AAP is revival of Congress. If slum, minorities and anti-BJP votes shift to Congress again then AAP may be in trouble. Also BJP may have become more popular among poor section. We must not read much into this by-election result but this may well be waring to AAP. If they don’t work as per people’s expectation, then their slide may be as spectacular as their rise.