The Force of One

THE BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY’S (BJP’S) VICTORY IN THE high-voltage Delhi elections has caused a tectonic shift in the po­litical landscape of the country. When Narendra Modi, the mascot for BJP’s campaign, clinched the win for the party after 27 years, he rose in stature as the nation’s most powerful political force. Modi’s popular appeal translates into the trust of ordinary voters at the ballot and his sweeping wins in state polls, both before and after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, have firmly established this.

When the dust settled, BJP had pocketed 48 seats, leaving the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) with just 22, and defeating big guns like Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia. BJP managed this decisive win in the capital after almost three decades, without projecting a chief ministerial face, using Modi as its sole posterboy for the polls. Here was proof that the prime minister’s popularity had demolished the seemingly impenetrable wall between AAP voters and those of BJP that existed for over a decade in Delhi’s Assembly elections.

Delhi’s elections have enormous implications for the country, and for BJP under Modi. With the Delhi win, the saffron party now is firmly entrenched in North India— Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar; in the west of the country—Gujarat and Maharashtra; in the Northeast—Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura; and Andhra Pradesh in South India.

Yet again the results of the Delhi polls belied the predictions of the Modi-baiting political pundits that dark clouds had begun to hover over him since the 2024 Lok Sabha election. At that time, BJP had set itself a target of 370 seats but managed to rake in only 240 seats, losing 63 seats compared to its 2019 tally, mainly in UP and Maharashtra. However, BJP’s massive wins later in the Haryana and Maharashtra Assembly polls, where they virtually snatched victory, riding on the shoulders of the prime minister, from the jaws of a much-projected defeat, belied the prognosis. Narendra Modi’s powerful stage presence and his personal appeal continued to work its magic not just at the national level but also at the regional stage. With the win in Delhi, the Modi-led BJP has delivered a hat-trick of victories after the Lok Sabha polls, superimposing the prime minister’s popularity and electoral invincibility. Just hours after the Delhi victory, the party’s core election team was set to hit the road for the upcoming state election in Bihar (due in October-November this year), where its ally Janata Dal (United) runs a government.

Under Modi’s command, BJP has grown manifold in political heft, winning as many as 10 elections in the last 14 months alone. The party repeated its win in MP and jostled out Congress in both Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, besides securing a third term for Modi in the Lok Sabha polls. It made decisive gains in a string of Assembly polls, including in Arunachal Pradesh, ended the 25-year reign of Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, and its alliance decimated YSR Congress Party in Andhra Pradesh. The big wins in Haryana and Maharash­tra followed, and BJP is now a formidable force in Jammu. The only election the party lost was that of Jharkhand. However, Modi’s Delhi win has reinforced his political resilience and the wide political footprint of BJP. In contrast, a struggling Congress now runs few state governments—Himachal Pradesh in the north; and, Karnataka and Telangana in the south of India.

That it was Modi’s own charisma that finally clinched the deal with Delhi’s voters for BJP, despite just three public rallies, was evident in the numbers. Kejriwal’s party, winning only 22 seats, secured a vote share of 43.57 per cent, down 10 per cent from the 53.57 per cent it raked in during the 2020 polls. Comparatively, BJP, whose tally was a thumping 48 seats, got a vote share of 45.56 per cent and a significant boost of 13 per cent despite more than two-and-a-half decades of political oblivion. The support came cutting across all demographics and socio-economic groups, a testament to Modi’s enduring charisma.

In one fell swoop, Modi’s Delhi victory set the stage for politi­cal transformation at multiple levels. That victory did not come without effort and strategic planning. The saffron party has been in power for 11 years now at the Centre, but had so far been pain­fully unsuccessful in winning back the trust of the people of the national capital. The last time BJP was in power in Delhi, it was a bitterly divided entity with the factions of Madan Lal Khurana and Sahib Singh Verma locking horns in a disturbing public spectacle. This was an image that the top leadership planned to change radically. BJP had many reasons to go all in and grab power in Delhi and end the 27-year drought. The national capital was a polluted eyesore with crumbling infrastructure and incapable of being showcased as a world-class city. A BJP government in Delhi could radically change all that in consonance with the BJP government at the Centre, seamlessly transforming the capital. Again, as a three-term chief minister, Kejriwal would acquire un­limited bragging rights. Grabbing power back after close to three decades would also send out a strident message on BJP’s electoral supremacy and the real benefits of a “double engine sarkar” to other seemingly ‘invincible’ bastions of the Opposition, includ­ing West Bengal, Punjab and even to the southern states.

A multi-pronged strategy was put in place under the baton of Home Minister Amit Shah. This included highlighting ev­ery scam allegation relentlessly and turning the strobe light on every flaw, every pockmark in the ecosystem surrounding Arvind Kejriwal. To counter his well-received populist schemes, a three-part manifesto unapologetically matched, measure-for-measure, every commitment to the poor, the socially margin­alised, and to women. High-profile leaders, including chief min­isters like Yogi Adityanath, Pushkar Singh Dhami and Himanta Biswa Sarma were roped in to appeal to the relevant social groups. Also, in the ongoing Maha Kumbh, the UP chief minister dared Kejriwal to take a dip in the holy Yamuna river, cleaning up which was one of the AAP supremo’s unkept promises.

VOTERS IN DELHI’S seven Lok Sabha seats who opt­ed for Modi and BJP in 2014 and 2019 but had shown a preference for the AAP and Kejriwal in Delhi’s As­sembly elections were methodically identified and targeted for attention by party leaders and MPs. Getting this 30 per cent swing voter into its fold as it did in the previous elections helmed and shaped by Narendra Modi (2015, 2020, 2024), became priority. According to calculations by number crunchers, AAP lost 29 per cent of the upper-caste vote, mainly to BJP and Congress in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections compared to the 2020 Vidhan Sabha polls. It lost 29 per cent of the OBC vote, 41 per cent of the Dalit vote, and 34 per cent of the Muslim vote to BJP and Congress. Shah’s strategy was to firmly shore up this vote percentage gained from AAP in 2024 during the Assembly elections.

But the mascot of BJP’s campaign was Prime Minister Modi. It was Modi who singularly wrested Delhi from AAP in the Lok Sabha elections of 2019 and 2024. Amit Shah leveraged this to the optimum in the capital. Between January 29 and February 2, the prime minister addressed three public rallies across the capital, striking a chord with citizens, seeking votes in his own name, and ensuring a thumping victory for BJP. In each rally, he launched targeted attacks on Arvind Kejriwal and the AAP government, which he described as an aapda (disaster) for the capital. The mes­sage was multifaceted, covering good governance and social and physical infrastructural growth. But he kept the focus firmly on the BJP’s “double engine sarkar”, which prioritised development in the states it governed and warned that Delhi risked losing out if its voters did not oust AAP once and for all. Showcasing his “Modi ki Guarantee”, the prime minister referred to free ration for the poor, and the excellent social and physical infrastructure that his government had invested in countrywide. Effectively translating the national narrative to the local level, Modi vowed that a BJP government would invest heavily in roads, schools, hospitals and pucca housing for the poor in Delhi.

Modi projected a vision of Delhi as not just world-class, but also appealed to heritage and traditions. Striking a deliberate Kumbh-resonant note, he promised the clean-up of the “holy Yamuna river” and a waterfront that citizens could take pride in. “I had pledged during the election campaign that we will make Yamuna maiyya the identity of Delhi city. I know this work is difficult and will take a long time. No matter how much time is spent, how much energy is used, we will make every effort to serve Ma Yamuna,” he said during the victory celebrations at the party headquarters.

But he was also aware that Delhi’s poor (most such residential colonies showed allegiance to AAP in earlier polls) and middle class had swing voters who needed to be actively wooed back. Studies of the period between the 2019 Lok Sabha election and the 2020 Assembly election estimated that in terms of socio-economic classes, AAP had lost 36 per cent of poor voters to BJP (19 per cent) and Congress (17 per cent). It also lost 23 per cent of middle-class voters, mainly to BJP (11 per cent) and Congress (12 per cent). And it lost 27 per cent of upper-class voters to BJP (11 per cent) and Congress (16 per cent). In his last public rally, Modi drew attention to the Union Budget by Nirmala Sitharaman and its focus on relief to the middle class of the country.

The move paid off. A delighted Modi put it in his address to party workers on February 8, the day of the result: “The lotus has bloomed, without reserve, in every part of the capital, among ev­ery people and community. It has totally swept out a corrupt and scamming government that the people of Delhi do not deserve.” The Modi brand appeal had propelled a virtually faceless, rudder­less party in Delhi to an astounding two-third seat win. The result of the Delhi election promises to rock the nation with significant political earthquakes in the run-up to May 2029.

There’s something very doubtful about Rahul Gandhi’s brand of politics and the ideo­logical lens through which he views the world. And the performance of Congress in Delhi brought that home sharply to those who could not grasp this so far.

For 15 years from 1998 to 2013, Congress towered over Delhi, with an unshakeable Sheila Dikshit at the helm. Looking to cash in on her once-upon-a-time popularity, her son Sandeep Dikshit contested against the man who trounced his mother from power, Arvind Kejriwal, but came up a very poor third, behind Parvesh Sahib Singh and Kejriwal him­self. Congress, which fought the Delhi battle against Kejriwal and AAP despite the strong disapproval of its I.N.D.I.A. bloc colleagues, did not win a single seat in the national capital and managed to secure a vote share of only 6.34 per cent, a measly 2.1 per cent increase compared to the last election. It had failed miserably again in coining a strategy to resuscitate itself in the capital.

The party lost its deposit in 67 of Delhi’s 70 seats and bit the dust badly, caught in the middle of a bitter battle between AAP and BJP. For Rahul Gandhi, this was yet another failure, after Congress managed only 99 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha election; after the failure in Haryana (where a cocksure Deepinder Hooda had declared his father the chief minister even before the results were out); and later, in Maharashtra, where pollsters and political pundits had predicted a fair chance at win­ning for the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA). In Haryana, Congress managed to win only 37 seats in the 90-member Assembly, compared to the 48 raked in by BJP, which dominated at the hustings. The rout in Maharashtra was phenomenal for the MVA coalition, includ­ing Congress, which was forced to stare at an abysmal 46 seats against the BJP-led Mahayuti’s overwhelming 235-seat triumph.

After the Delhi results were out, Modi took a scathing pot­shot at Congress and its top leaders on their poll performance. He maintained that Gandhi had scored a “double hat-trick” of zeroes in the past elections. Congress was unable to corner even a single seat in the capital for the past six elections, including the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The developments triggered a meme fest on social media, one of which showed a poker-faced Rahul Gandhi as an attendant at a petrol punk, telling the vehicle owners multiple times: “Zero check kar lo, Sir.” In a post on X, Gandhi said after the results: “We humbly accept the mandate of the people of Delhi. We will continue to raise the issues of pollution, inflation and cor­ruption that matter to the Capital’s citizens.” This, though, could virtually be a template reaction for Congress in the aftermath of most elections fought under his watch and command.

The political life of Rahul Gandhi has been defined by a series of electoral setbacks and disasters since 2014. Under Gandhi’s watch, Congress has literally lurched from defeat to defeat, leav­ing only a crumbling outer edifice with a geographical spread countrywide but with little ability or motivation to convert its advantages into seats at the hustings. Gandhi precedes an en­feebled party with woke ideas that translate into unintelligible banality on the ground.

RAHUL GANDHI WAS appointed leader of Opposi­tion (LoP) in June last year and this development, com­ing after a decade of no LoP (Mallikarjun Kharge and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury were leaders of Congress thanks to the lack of sufficient numbers) was expected to give a big boost to the I.N.D.I.A. bloc (234 seats compared to NDA’s 293). “He has, therefore, to measure carefully his words and actions, and on a matter of national interest, to act with as much responsibility as is expected of the Prime Minister,” the manual on ‘Practice and Procedure of Parliament’ says, adding that the LoP has to be ready to “take up the responsibility of forming a government if his party secures a majority at an election or if the government resigns or is defeated.” But Gandhi repeatedly fell short of the sobriety and maturity that marks an LoP,

Within weeks of his appointment, cracks began to show up within the I.N.D.I.A. bloc on issues to be prioritised in Lok Sabha and the manner in which they had to be raised. While Gandhi and Congress persistently attacked Gautam Adani, two key alli­ance members, Trinamool Congress (TMC) and Samajwadi Party (SP), viewed this as a non-issue. But driven by a remarkable level of immaturity, Gandhi has, time and again, adopted corporate bullying as a standard ploy in his playbook. And he took wealth-shaming to a ridiculous extent without reference to facts. From every podium, he claimed that government policies were custom-made just for two industrialists. Modi’s repeat wins, especially where Congress is in direct contest with BJP, have unmasked Rahul Gandhi’s own low credibility and his frivolous claims on crony capitalism, the economy, including manufacturing, infrastructure, and the MSME sector.

The irony is that Rahul Gandhi has been led by his courtiers to believe that his interventions in politics are of seminal value and that he has the potential to emerge as a true challenger to Narendra Modi in the national sphere. The party’s abysmal per­formance in Delhi has only highlighted again the glaring hollow­ness of this presumption, even while exposing the leadership’s very confused and indecisive political and electoral priorities.

In Delhi, Gandhi appeared driven mostly by the state unit’s fervour in putting up a spirited fight. His rather tentative Janu­ary 13 public rally was followed by a “falling ill” episode which later turned into three rallies on one day, all attacking Kejriwal more than BJP or Modi. In going against the inclinations of the other I.N.D.I.A. bloc members on AAP, Gandhi once again ended up with egg on his face. There could be surreptitious rejoicing in the party leadership for the decimation of Kejriwal, who not only brought Sheila Dikshit’s government down in Delhi, but that of UPA 2 nationally as part of Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption. But nothing could take away from the fact that Rahul Gandhi’s style of woke politics had failed miserably to de­liver and has driven Congress and his own political credibility into the ground.

As usual, durbaris jumped up to contextualise the Delhi drub­bing under Gandhi’s watch even while gloating at Kejriwal’s defeat. Jairam Ramesh’s post on X firmly ignored the Congress drubbing and held forth on the evils of Kejriwal and his govern­ment. From Gandhi or his courtiers, there was neither a sense of introspection nor an urgency to seriously go back to the draw­ing board. In 34 seats of the capital, the BJP’s margin of victory exceeded the total votes garnered by Congress.

On February 8, the day of the results, addressing jubilant party workers at the BJP headquarters in the capital, Prime Minister Modi called a spade a spade: “This is not the old Congress party, this is not a party with national vision or astute leadership. They don’t say it openly but the allies, too, have wised up and are aware that Congress is hell bent on stealing back the vote banks that regional parties have managed to wrest from it. For years after 2014, its leader [Rahul Gandhi] sported his janeu [holy thread] and rushed from one temple to another in the hope that Congress could win back the support of those who fled from it to back to BJP. They failed miserably to shake BJP voters. And now you don’t see the Congress leadership on temple tours any longer, now they have latched on to regional parties and are trying to steal back vot­ers by latching on like parasites to the ideology of regional allies.”

Under Rahul Gandhi’s leadership and in its bid to regain pow­er, Congress has also transmogrified into a caste-census thump­ing party with an apparent socialist outlook. Gandhi himself has mutated from a janeudar earlier to a leader echoing close ally DMK’s brand of anti-Sanatani spiritually agnostic views. Thanks to Gandhi and the top leadership, today Congress may well find itself beyond redemption.

In 2015, soon after the IIT-educated, former RTI activ­ist returned to power in Delhi with a thumping majority, Arvind Kejriwal is known to have revealed a pathological compulsion to snoop on his rivals and to nurture a personality cult using subterfuge, statistics and a well-controlled media that worked on image management. Micromanaging policies and politics emerged as an intrinsic part of his nature. His friends and supporters, most of whose association with him was known to be both manipulative and transactional, claimed he could not be faulted for running a tight ship. It proved to be suffocating for the average Delhi voter who showed him the door on February 5.

THE KEJRIWAL MYTH was built on a fertile political stage already set by Sheila Dikshit. In the last delimi­tation exercise, the then chief minister had redrawn constituencies in such a way that the voters in Delhi’s many JJ colonies became important in every Assembly constitu­ency. This came in handy for Kejriwal. His image managers gave their seal of approval for his loose common man trousers, his creaseless bush shirts, his aam aadmi chappals, that distinct red muffler and a niggling cough in winter. Dressed for the occasion, Everyman Kejriwal, once he became chief minister, singled out the JJ colony voters for attention and showered them with freebies (dhobi colonies were excused electricity charges and protected from ouster, for instance) to cultivate their political loyalty. Over the years, this paid handsome dividends. But for the first time in over a decade, this election, a significant section of the JJ colony voters across Delhi moved away from AAP and its chief.

What helped in Kejriwal’s rise as the hope of the liberal intel­ligentsia was their desperate quest for an alternative to the mor­ally decrepit Congress of 2015 to challenge Modi and BJP. In their own perception, they had a disproportionate say in setting and propagating national narratives and it suited them to prop up Kejriwal for the ticket. Once he had control of the capital’s trea­sury, it became a simple matter to cultivate influencers, main­stream media and its owners (swaying them through advertise­ments, and so on) and the cult of Kejriwal had begun.

Things began sliding downwards during the second term, however. Kejriwal had by then become trapped by his own cul­tivated image of an all-powerful neta who held unassailable sway over the capital and who could take on Modi. With the delusion of immense power came the adjuncts of greed and corruption, ar­rogance and hubris. Scams in every field, including the mohalla clinics, government school upgrades, the liquor excise scam, money laundering for spending on Goa elections, the accusations tumbled over each other in quick succession. Profligate spending allegations on ‘ sheesh mahal’, the Delhi chief minister’s official resi­dence, was the last but not the least to cloud his second term. With Satyendar Jain, Sanjay Singh, Manish Sisodia, even his media man­ager Vijay Nair incarcerated one by one, it was only a matter of time before the noose tightened around Kejriwal and he, too, was sent behind bars. Slowly but surely, the Kejriwal myth began to unravel.

With just 22 seats in his kitty in Delhi after all the tall talk, he now stands diminished significantly and stripped of his self-aggrandisement. In December 2022, years into his second term, the AAP chieftain preened that BJP would not even garner 20 seats in the upcoming and prestigious civic body polls. Fighting mostly in the name of Narendra Modi, BJP managed to get 105 seats while AAP raked in 133 seats. This was promptly trumpeted by the media as incontrovertible proof that Modi’s popularity and brand appeal could not impact local elections. Kejriwal, who packaged himself as a “kattar imaandar” neta, further declared that Delhi had proved itself invincible and would remain impen­etrable to BJP. Challenging Modi, the AAP chief also proclaimed, “Narendra Modi cannot trounce Kejriwal in this lifetime….forget 2025, the BJP cannot oust us even by 2050.” Kejriwal did not see the tsunami coming. Ultimately, his hubris got the better of him.

The extent of his humiliation at the hustings was appalling. Kejriwal lost in 115 of the 123 booths from his New Delhi seat. Also shocking for AAP was that all its top leaders, includ­ing Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, and senior leaders Satyendar Jain and Saurabh Bhardwaj, lost from their seats.

It was a drastically changed Kejriwal who took to a recording, after defeat, to maintain meekly that AAP would play the role of a “constructive Opposition” in Delhi as mandated by voters: the body language was of a man defeated and a personality cult decimated, with none of the swagger that marked his second term. The prime minister’s warning that all CAG reports would be tabled in the Assembly as soon as it was convened and wrongdoers brought to book likely triggered the fear in his eyes. AAP got off to a strong and early start in the election campaign playing the victim card, leaving BJP and Congress way behind. But Kejriwal began espousing desperate measures closer to the polling day.

The unravelling of the Kejriwal myth, carefully crafted by a suppliant media, influencers and an image management infra­structure, had begun not far into his second term. By the time AAP wrested power in the civic body elections end-2022, it was clear that the sell-by-date of the victim card and the blame game with BJP over the control of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) had expired. Kejriwal had resorted to politically monetising his confrontations with the lieutenant governor and the BJP-controlled civic body for years to obfuscate his shortcomings and it worked well. He blamed BJP for water, sanitation, sewerage and other civic problems. But once the MCD elections were dominated by AAP, there was no one else to blame. That painstaking narrative had been bolstered for several months by the AAP-friendly media and a liberal ecosystem opposed to Narendra Modi. Post December 2022, however, the expectations of the Delhi voter on vastly improved civic amenities and anti-pollution measures as a basic right in the capital grew exponentially. The voter was determined not to let banal excuses get in the way of real action on the ground.

“The new government will ensure that every rupee stolen from the people is returned to Delhi’s citizens,” Modi asserted after BJP swept the polls, routing AAP. The man whose startup political venture took the reins of both Delhi and Punjab and nurtured great ambitions as far away as in Modi’s home state of Gujarat and in BJP-ruled Goa, will now have his image managed by men not of his choosing.

Narendra Modi took on Kejriwal’s taunting dare and brought home a BJP win for Delhi after 27 long years. But BJP’s victories have far bigger national repercussions on the opposition to Modi. Cracks began showing up in the Opposition I.N.D.I.A. bloc imme­diately after February 8, with most of the ire trained on Congress. Taking to X soon after the debacle faced by Congress, the National Conference’s (NC’s) Omar Abdullah, who runs a government in Srinagar in alliance with Congress, posted mockingly: “Aur lado Dilli mein”, accompanied by the picture of an ascetic. The message was clearly to Congress on its enmity with AAP in Delhi. An irked Congress shot back the next day with “fight against the BJP-RSS combine is impossible without Congress.” Ravinder Sharma, chief spokesperson of JKPCC, lashed out at both AAP and NC, saying that the verdict in Delhi was against AAP’s 10-year misrule and its hubris that led it to believe it could defeat BJP on its own. AAP, he stressed, wrongfully believed it could “single-handedly take on the BJP-RSS or indulge in opportunistic alliances.”

MEANWHILE, OTHER ALLIES were quick to register that the results in Delhi would affect their coalition gravely. An editorial in the Saamana, the Shiv Sena (UBT) organ, mincing no words, ques­tioned the need for an Opposition alliance any longer. “In Delhi, both AAP and Congress fought to destroy each other, making things easier for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah. If this continues, why even form alliances? Just fight to your heart’s content!” news agency PTI reported cit­ing the editorial in Saamana. “The loss in Delhi elections is directly affecting the democratic processes in the country. Even in Maha­rashtra, local Congress leaders had stretched seat-sharing talks [for the Assembly polls] till the end and it resulted in portraying a chaotic picture,” it said.

Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, another key alli­ance member held a key party meeting with MLAs in Kolkata after the Delhi debacle where she openly chided Congress and AAP for ruining the performance of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc partners. “If the Aam Aadmi Party [AAP] and the Congress had contested together, the poll results of Delhi would have been different…AAP didn’t support Congress in Haryana and the Congress didn’t support AAP in Delhi polls.” In the face of prognosis that the Delhi poll results send out a strong message from BJP to the apparently invincible states of West Bengal, Banerjee reportedly said: “The result of the Delhi polls will not have any impact on the Bengal Assembly polls scheduled next year. We will fight alone and Congress doesn’t have anything here. We will come back with two-third majority.” Her announce­ment that TMC would dump the alliance and go it alone in the next Assembly election is crucial evidence of a rapidly disintegrating Opposition coalition. Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav, meanwhile, also directly blamed Congress for AAP’s defeat in Delhi.

The fissiparous tendencies of the alliance, which has often been criticised for having only one issue—hatred for Modi—prevents it from staying together as was seen after Congress’ rout in Haryana and the defeat of MVA in Maharashtra. The coalition has yet to meet even once since the state Assembly elections. Several weeks after the decimation in Haryana or Maharashtra, the I.N.D.I.A. bloc remained in hibernation and denial mode, already raising big questions on its own fate, leave alone challenging Narendra Modi’s political might. Alliance leaders, including Sharad Pawar, emphasised the need to consider a change in the leadership of the coalition, with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee even presenting herself as an able candidate for the post of convenor of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc.

The contradictions within the bloc have risen to a level where no ally is today willing to cede ground to Congress and the trust quotient in the party among its allies is pretty low. Some of its lead­ers even campaigned against Congress in Delhi and considered Congress’ Delhi fight as a hostile action. Seat-sharing problems are likely to hit a peak in impending elections in states such as Bihar and elsewhere where Congress is set to contest in alliance with strong regional parties. And in states such as West Bengal and Kerala, the fight between the I.N.D.I.A. bloc partners is likely to rock the frame of the coalition further.

Not only could the Modi-propelled victory impact the shape of AAP in Delhi in the coming weeks but it could also likely take a toll on AAP’s government in Punjab, and put paid to its future plans for states such as Gujarat and Goa, both BJP-ruled, where Kejriwal’s party got a drubbing in the last Assembly polls. The challenge for the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, whatever shape it finds itself in, is monumental.

Postscript: The Communist Party of India (Marxist), that contested two seats in Delhi—Karawal Nagar and Badarpur—got 379 and 170 votes, respectively. But that will not deter its leaders who occupy an unkempt office in Delhi’s Gole Market from sending periodic advisories to Prime Minister Modi on issues ranging from agriculture to AI.

Akhilesh YadavArvind KejriwalBJPDelhi Assembly Election 2025Mamata BanerjeeNarendra Modinational politcsRahul Gandhi