New Delhi, India – Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), have stunningly lost the Delhi assembly election in a major turnaround for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which is now poised to govern the capital again after 27 years.
Twelve years since its sensational ride to power in the 1993 assembly elections on the back of a popular anticorruption movement, it was clear Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, his deputy, had lost their constituencies well before vote counting had finished on Saturday.
The AAP temporarily locked down its party headquarters in Lutyens’ Delhi on Saturday afternoon as celebrations broke out at the nearby BJP offices, adorned in the party colour of saffron, with party workers dancing and distributing sweets. “Development wins, good governance triumphs,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on X.
Jana Shakti is paramount!
Development wins, good governance triumphs.
I bow to my dear sisters and brothers of Delhi for this resounding and historic mandate to @BJP4India. We are humbled and honoured to receive these blessings.
It is our guarantee that we will leave no…
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 8, 2025
In the 70-seat assembly in Delhi, the BJP had crossed the majority mark of 35 seats by Saturday afternoon, winning more than 48 seats by the afternoon. The AAP tally went from the 63 seats it won in the 2020 election to 22 seats as counting was still continuing in the afternoon.
“What once started as a people’s movement had now fizzled into a mere political party,” said Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research (CPR), referring to the AAP. “Kejriwal is perhaps just a politician now and once that shine wears off, the core voters’ affiliation is weakened.”
Delhi, where more than 33 million people live and the national capital city, New Delhi, is located, is the centre of political power in India – and one that until now has remained out of the grip of the BJP despite its meteoric political rise under Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2014.
“Delhi is a mini India, it has a substantial population from various regions of the country – and the BJP has shown that if they can win Delhi, they can win anything,” Rasheed Kidwai, a political analyst, told Al Jazeera. “This turnaround is significant because this victory is a story of BJP’s micromanagement in constituencies. And tells us that they are unmatched.”
BJP’s ride to the capital
Modi’s BJP suffered a humbling moment in June last year when the Hindu nationalist party lost its parliamentary majority in the national election and was left to govern with the support of regional allies.
Seven months later, the BJP has comfortably won three major state elections – Maharashtra, Haryana and Delhi – where it was expected to face a resurging opposition, analysts told Al Jazeera, further cementing its expanding control over Indian polity.
“Since the [national] election, our party has been reaching out to our grassroots workers, who have worked hard, to ensure that the message of prosperity reaches every voter,” Zafar Islam, BJP’s national spokesperson, told Al Jazeera. “This is a defeat of the AAP’s arrogance and bad governance.”
While the AAP had come to be known for its welfare programmes, the BJP doubled down on similar promises in its campaign which also took on a Hindu nationalist undertone in Delhi. “Elections in India have become highly transactional and the voter wants to know what will they get for their vote,” said Kidwai.
Delhi’s electorate is also among the most unequal, with regard to caste and class differences, said Sircar. “Unless you’re able to get at least some bits and pieces of all the population, it’s going to be hard to win the election,” he said. A section of so-called “upper-caste” voters, which form nearly 40 percent of Delhi’s population, he added, had flocked across to the BJP, attracted by promises of subsidies and development as well as a desire for change following more than a decade of AAP rule.
In the run-up to the election, in which nearly 9.5 million people voted on Wednesday, the BJP did not confirm its pick for chief minister for Delhi, which Kidwai said, worked in the party’s favour. “There was no disillusionment [about any one candidate] among the different castes or voters from other regions and the suspense kept the stage even for them and rolled to their advantage.”
The Congress party, India’s oldest party, which leads the national opposition, INDIA alliance, has remained on the periphery in the assembly for some time and, this time, failed to win a single seat in the Delhi assembly election.
Clearly surprised by the results, Nivedita Menon, a professor of politics at Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), said: “It feels like BJP will never lose an election again. They have the system sewn up tight.”
‘Message for Kejriwal’
Before the national election last year, Kejriwal was arrested by India’s financial crime agency on corruption charges. His deputy, Sisodia, has spent 17 months in Tihar jail, Delhi, on charges of money laundering. His trial is continuing. And their two terms, secured by landslide victories, were marred by the continuous tussle with the centre-appointed lieutenant governor to wrestle more control over Delhi.
This time, it was Kejriwal’s turn for a humbling moment when, on Saturday morning, his party lost the Delhi assembly to the BJP. The AAP had touted the election as a referendum on its governance, and its leaders’ innocence in the cases they claim are a political vendetta by the BJP.
“There was now this imagination that Kejriwal and AAP also do politics as usual – and they are not cleaner than other parties,” said Sircar, adding that middle-class voters appeared “disillusioned with Kejriwal’s tactics and constant confrontation with the central government”.
The BJP has won all seven of Delhi’s seats in the last three parliamentary elections but had until now failed to win the voters in the assembly election, which is held every five years.
“There was strong anti-incumbency [against the AAP] after a decade and that hurt its image among middle-class voters, which resulted in the swing,” Sircar added. “And the BJP had an edge in the perception battle [against] Kejriwal – that he just cries foul, or he is a ‘hoax’, and does not perform in governance.”
Kejriwal lost his assembly seat, the New Delhi constituency, to BJP’s Parvesh Verma – who has called for a “social boycott” of Muslims – by more than 3,100 votes in the New Delhi constituency. Sisodia, his deputy, also lost the Jangpura constituency in southeast Delhi to the BJP. As counting continued into the evening on Saturday, Several other popular leaders of the party were trailing behind but had not yet been forced to concede.
“That is a clear message that things were not good for Kejriwal because any political party that has all heavyweights trailing means there is no way they could come to power,” said Kidwai, the analyst.
Unchartered territory
On Saturday afternoon, silence fell over the AAP’s party headquarters. Experts say the party now needs to focus on picking up the pieces. “It will put them in a difficult spot because in Delhi they have been in power since their inception. The party has not faced a time out of power in Delhi,” said Rahul Verma, a political commentator.
“Their national leaders losing is an embarrassment and will choke the expansionist impulse, which AAP had a couple of years ago,” said Verma, referring to the other Indian state elections where the AAP has been competing, such as Gujrat, and Jammu and Kashmir. Currently, Kejriwal’s party also governs the neighbouring state of Punjab.
With Kejriwal out of the upcoming assembly, the tables have turned in Delhi politics, experts said. This is unchartered territory.
For more than 10 years, the BJP has maintained complete control over the country’s parliament, located in New Delhi, but always remained at a distance from state powers. “The BJP now has the same kind of centralisation that Modi has been peddling, the so-called ‘double engine’ campaign,” said Sircar.
But the saffron party needs to be cautious, he warned, as Delhi has changed since the BJP last won the assembly election in 1993. Sircar said: “The BJP has not governed Delhi that looks like this or feels like this – a modern cosmopolitan imagination.”