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We Wish You all a Happy and Safe Holi              March 2020 Edition of Power Politics is updated.
Issue:March' 2020

KEJRIWAL’S HAT-TRICK

Jolt to BJP in Delhi

Rajeev Sharma Baby Mufflerman attends Arvind
Kejriwal’s oath-taking ceremony
in Delhi

Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal at Ramlila Maida Delhi assembly election results are a stunner! It was a David versus Goliath fight as the ruling party at the Centre, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had fielded 70 union ministers, eleven chief ministers and 270 MPs, apart from the Big Two: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.
And yet Delhi Electronic Voting Machines ( EVMs) gave a current to not only to the BJP but also to its strongman and one of the two poster boys of the BJP, namely Amit Shah, severely denting Shah’s image as the contemporary Chanakya. If you count from Punjab, when the BJP slide began and it ended up losing assembly elections, Delhi marks seventh consecutive loss for the BJP. Between Punjab and Delhi figure Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Jharkhand.

Time to think, pause and reflect Shah's bravado of telling Delhi voters to press the EVM button with such anger that its current is felt in Shaheen Bagh, the site of anti-CAA protests for last over 50 days and the main fulcrum of BJP’s campaign in Delhi elections, boomeranged on himself. And that too after Shah was the BJP’s lead campaigner, having campaigned intensively in 38 of the 70 assembly constituencies of Delhi.
The Modi-Shah theatrics and a highly acerbic, abusive and divisive campaign (where chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was called a “terrorist”) could not prevent Kejriwal from scoring a hat trick of wins for his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a party that was born only on 26 November, 2012. The result was abysmal for the BJP which had to eat the humble pie and ended up with just eight seats in the 70-member Delhi assembly despite a highoctane, highly aggressive and polarizing campaign.

However, the big takeaway for the BJP from this election was that it was able to increase its tally marginally to eight seats this time from its 2015 tally of just three seats and increase its vote share from 32 per cent in 2015 to 38.5 per cent in 2020.

This was largely because of a lackluster performance from the Congress which came up with the second consecutive duck and failed to open its account in Delhi assembly. As many as 63 out of 70 candidates of the Congress lost their deposit as they failed to muster even one sixth of the votes.

Why the Grand Old Party put up such a bad performance which resulted in halving of its previous vote share of less than ten percent? The political circles were agog with conspiracy theories that the Congress had “sacrificed” and secretly supported AAP knowing that it wasn’t capable to take on the BJP and that the BJP had to be kept away from gaining power in Delhi after 22 years. The exultant remarks made by several Congress leaders, including P Chidambaram, lent credence to such conspiracy theories.

The Delhi election was no ordinary poll. It was a virtual referendum on many issues, the style of campaign and national versus local issues as it was the first election after the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by Parliament on December 11.

The BJP fought this election on national agenda, having little to say about the local needs of Delhi. The strategy failed once again as it had failed in Jharkhand too, the previous electoral loss for the BJP. The Delhi election also demonstrated and proved that a political party can still win an election solely on its work agenda and the development plank. This has to be one of the biggest lessons to be learnt from the Delhi elections.

The Delhi election was no ordinary poll. It was a virtual referendum on many issues, the style of campaign and national versus local issues as it was the first election after the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by Parliament on December 11. The BJP fought this election on national agenda, having little to say about the local needs of Delhi.

Now let’s consider the impact on the three major players -- AAP, BJP and Congress – in the aftermath of Delhi polls.

AAP: The party would obviously find itself on an upward trajectory and would like to capitalize on its success in Delhi by spreading its wings. But AAP must beware of a déjà vu feeling of having done that before unsuccessfully. AAP must remember that in Delhi it ate into the Congress vote share (while the BJP vote bank remained intact), but on the national elections the same advantage won’t be in its kitty. This election could have posed an existential threat to AAP if it had lost, but not to the Congress. The GoP has the heft to absorb such an electoral loss but this luxury isn’t available to AAP.

BJP: The saffron party has been made to eat a humble pie by a local player like AAP, but on the national scene, the BJP continues to be a Colossus and that status isn’t going to change. And yet one should not be surprised if the BJP were to continue with its Shaheen Bagh style of campaign in Bihar assembly polls, due in less than nine months, as polarizing voters on Hindu-Muslim plank, though firmly rejected by Delhi voters, is likely to get traction in Bihar assembly polls as Bihar is drastically different from Delhi and a Shaheen Bagh campaign style there is more likely to succeed in a casteriven society like Bihar. Moreover, polarization is the only trump card left for the BJP in next assembly elections in important states like West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat before the grand finale of the 2024 General elections.

Congress: The Congress party’s dismal performance in Delhi elections 2020 may be a shocker for a party that ruled Delhi for three successive full tenures under the leadership of the late Sheila Dixit, but the Delhi loss doesn’t pose an existential crisis for it. Big national parties are known to take such electoral losses routinely. The Congress doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel and only needs to reimplement its own resolution in Pachmarhi in 1998: prepare itself for embracing more and more allies to take on the ruling party, the BJP.

After the Delhi results, the BJP will have to thrash out a new campaign model in next assembly polls as the Shaheen Bagh model has been punctured by AAP.

Significantly, a day after the February 8 polling in Delhi, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) general secretary Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi came up with an intriguing remark: “The Hindu community is not synonymous with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and that opposing BJP does not amount to opposing Hindus.”

This may well be interpreted as a RSS nudge to the BJP to recalibrate and re-strategize its future election campaigns.

The BJP finds itself in a tight spot after the usual poll issues like the Ram temple in Ayodhya and the revocation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir are long dusted. Even Pakistan-bashing no longer helps!