Delhi’s new chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, had said soon after the Assembly election results came in that the verdict was scary. The Aam Aadmi Party or AAP won 67 of the 70 Delhi Assembly seats for which elections were held early this month. In the December 2013 elections, the AAP had bagged only 28 seats. Even the most optimistic within the AAP could not have forecast such a landslide victory, one which reduced the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP to only three seats, down from the respectable 31 seats that it had won in 2013.
So why would Mr Kejriwal describe the verdict as scary? Going by his own explanation, it was scary because the unprecedented nature of the verdict could make his party arrogant — a problem that the Congress suffered from, and the BJP too was infected with after it had secured a simple majority in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014. This assessment is not incorrect. But there are at least two other reasons why the AAP should view the Assembly elections’ verdict with caution.
One, the BJP may have lost miserably in terms of the number of seats in the new Assembly, but its core vote bank has remained by and large intact. In Delhi, the BJP is said to have two million members. Its vote share in the Assembly elections was around 2.9 million. This is more than its core membership strength in the state. You might argue that it had managed to garner as much as 46 per cent vote share in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, but then voters exercise their franchise in national elections for different considerations than they do in local elections. The Narendra Modi factor in the Lok Sabha elections also helped the party get many voters from outside its traditional vote bank. That factor had ceased to be as effective in the Delhi Assembly elections early this month for a variety of reasons.
Thus, compared to the 33 per cent vote share in the December 2013 Assembly elections, the BJP got a vote share of around 32 per cent in the February 2015 polls. It represents a fall, but not a significant fall or vote erosion as to cause a major long-term concern for the BJP. Fourteen months ago in December 2013, the BJP had garnered over 2.6 million votes. Today, the number of votes polled is not down, but marginally up at 2.9 million. The BJP will be more worried about why its vote share did not go up by a bigger margin and why it failed to benefit from the huge loss of votes that the Congress sustained in the latest round of Assembly polls.
The AAP leadership, therefore, would do well to recognise that notwithstanding the BJP’s massive reversal in the form of seat loss, its core support base has remained intact. And given an opportunity, the BJP can bounce back on the strength of its existing and as yet undiluted vote bank.
The second, and perhaps bigger, area of concern for the AAP will be the source of its increased vote share in the just-concluded Assembly polls. The AAP’s share in votes in the December 2013 Assembly elections was close to 30 per cent with the party having polled about 2.3 million votes. In February 2015, that vote share has gone up to 54 per cent and the number of votes polled to about 4.9 million. A safe assumption to explain this more than 100 per cent jump in the number of its votes is that the Congress’ votes have crossed over to the AAP. The Congress’ vote share between these two Assembly elections has moved down from 24 per cent to 9 per cent, and the number of votes polled by the party has declined from 1.9 million to 0.9 million in the same period.
There is an important message in these numbers. Of the 2.6 million additional votes the AAP polled this time, it is reasonable to estimate that almost 1 million of these could have come from the traditional Congress vote bank, which must have deserted Sonia Gandhi’s party this time. Where did the rest of the AAP votes come from? The Bahujan Samaj Party also lost votes by a big amount – down from over 420,000 votes in 2013 to 117,000 votes now. It is possible that the Bahujan Samaj Party’s loss of about 300,000 votes was also the gain for the AAP. That, however, still leaves a question mark over the source of another 1.3 million extra votes that the AAP got this time. Whose vote share did the AAP get to boost its tally?
Perhaps the answer to this question lies in the number of new voters in the Assembly polls this time. The number of new voters added to the electorate in February 2014 was about 1.3 million. Similarly, the number of votes polled this time has also gone up by 1.1 million, compared to what happened in December 2013. It is, therefore, likely that Mr Kejriwal has succeeded in garnering the support of a large chunk of these new voters. Most of these new voters will have been young, first-time voters and Mr Kejriwal’s appeal to them was undoubtedly strong, much more than that of any other political party in the fray.
The verdict of February 2015, therefore, must not be interpreted simplistically. It is important to remember that the BJP vote bank remains intact. The Congress’ vote bank has shifted to Mr Kejriwal for now, but can move over to anybody else and the new voters’ expectations must be high from the promises he has made in his election manifesto. Mr Kejriwal may face a tough time if he cannot retain the new voters and those who have shifted from the Congress.
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