The Aam Admi Party (AAP) has won a landslide victory in the Delhi assembly elections with 67 out of the 70 seats, securing about 54 percent of the vote. The Congress has been reduced to zero and the BJP soundly thrashed by the Delhi voters to just 3 seats. What a humiliation and slap on the face of the BJP top leadership headed by PM Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah! What happened between May, 2014 when the BJP swept Delhi, winning all the seven Lok Sabha seats, with leads in 60 of the 70 assembly constituencies and now, for the BJP to lose so badly? That too, after virtually treating the elections as a war to be won by mobilizing almost the entire Modi cabinet and 200 MPs, not to mention regional satraps from Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan etc led by the redoubtable Modi himself and so-called strategist, Amit Shah? The amount of money poured into the campaign must have been colossal. Would the Election Commission make an inquiry?
There are several factors. Firstly, the party leadership became arrogant and haughty. The top leaders sounded smug and complacent. Secondly, Modi seemed to have forgotten his promises made at election time last year. India being won, he seemed more interested in becoming an international leader. His trips to Japan, USA and Australia besides to some countries in the neighborhood at regular intervals gave an impression that he was more intent on building up his image abroad, than focusing on delivering on his promises of good governance and development within the country.
And when he was in India, he was mostly in the thick of election campaigns in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and Jammu & Kashmir. Or he was busy entertaining the VVIP guests like Presidents of Russia, China and USA. The promises were forgotten or put on the back burner.
Then the religious fanatics of the lunatic fringe within the party like Sakshi Maharaj and within the Sangh Parivar began to grab headlines by talking of re-conversion of non-Hindus, ban on cow slaughter with death penalty for cow killers, etc. Significantly, Modi kept silent to all these shenanigans of his comrades. He suddenly appeared to have lost his voice. The attacks on a number of churches during the past two months by mischief-makers and subsequent lackadaisical attitude of the police only served to add insult to injury. These incidents helped in turning the minority vote against the BJP.
BJP’s attempt to dirty the election campaign by using dubious and frustrated elements to try and tarnish the reputation of Kejriwal and AAP by making allegations of the so-called black money laundering also backfired. The attempts to hit Kejriwal below the belt by Arun Jaitley and Nirmala Sitharaman boomeranged on them as the astute voters of Delhi did not buy their lies and innuendos.
And we must not forget that Kejriwal repeatedly apologized for his mistakes of the past, including running away from governing. Humility has helped him to regain the love and trust of the Delhites. Hopefully, the voters of the capital city have shown the way forward for the rest of the country including the capital city of Panjim in Goa, which is having a bye-election tomorrow.
