Delhi Assembly Elections 2025: Why Exit Polls Predict Saffron Swing For Bjp, Aap loss
Delhi voters are quite distinct from other states. Caste plays a key role in elections in other states. But the voters in Delhi majorly look beyond their caste backgrounds to vote on group identities.
The bedrock of the 15-year-long tenure of the late Sheila Dikshit as the Chief Minister of Delhi was majorly the Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs). She accorded prominence to leaders of RWAs by holding regular meetings with them at the Delhi secretariat on a fortnightly basis.
The electoral constituency of the RWAs shifted loyalty lock stock and barrel to the AAP in the 2015 Assembly elections and stayed firmly with the Kejriwal-led outfit even in the 2020 polls.
The BJP for the past six months had been working with the RWAs. The functionaries of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) too sought to break the AAP stronghold in the RWAs. The scale of the outreach is said to be on the lines of Maharashtra where the RSS functionaries had held as high as 20,000 close door meetings.
In the 2020 Assembly elections, out of over 13,000 polling booths in Delhi, the AAP had polled a whopping 18 lakh more votes than the BJP in 8000 of them. The BJP’s clear strategy was to narrow the difference with the AAP.
To bridge the gap, the BJP embarked on an extraordinarily micro-managed poll strategy, at least a year ahead of the elections. At the time when the AAP workers were awaiting release of the AAP leaders from the Tihar Jail, the BJP was mapping the route to bridge booth-to-booth the gap with the Kejriwal-led outfit.
The absence of key AAP leaders from the scene for a long spells may have had a debilitating effect on the rank and file of the party.
Still, the APP has the force of ‘bottom-up’ against the ‘top-down’ of the BJP in the Delhi elections. It might be the party’s only hope.
(The author is a senior Delhi-based journalist with over two decades of political journalism spent with The New Indian Express, The Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, and The Statesman. This is an opinion article.)
