On February 8, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) lost power in Delhi to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which relied on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personality cult to stage its comeback in the “city-state” it had not ruled since 1998. The people picking Modi over Kejriwal is expected to bolster the image of the Indian prime minister after his national election setback last summer, when his party’s tally plummeted from 303 to 237, forcing him to ally unpredictable allies like Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to form the government.
The BJP is likely to frame the mandate in the Union Territory of Delhi as validation of its federal overreaches when it comes to its dealings with opposition-ruled states, where centrally appointed governors have shown a tendency to run parallel power apparatus. In Delhi, Kejriwal’s third term in office saw a bellicose Lieutenant Governor Vinai Saxena usurp executive powers from the AAP government. Central agencies hounded its senior functionaries, including Kejriwal who spent five months in jail over graft charges. He ran his government from behind bars; it was only after the Supreme Court granted him bail in September 2024 that he resigned as chief minister and nominated his trusted colleague, Atishi Marlena, as a stop-gap leader.
Though neither the AAP nor the Congress made dark forebodings about the state of Indian democracy the central theme of their campaign, Kejriwal said in his interviews that the people would use their ballot to respond to the BJP’s political witch-hunts. The lack of public admonishment for the BJP – it won 48 of Delhi’s 70 assembly seats, up from eight in 2020 – astounds. This will encourage the ruling party to more deeply entrench its authoritarian model, which in the short term will translate into more empowering of the office of the governor and more obstruction of the functioning of non-allied state governments.
In the long term, several opposition leaders and political thinkers have warned of India’s descent into a centralized system with the prime minister assuming presidential vetoes and growing in stature vis-a-vis the Parliament.
The AAP’s exit from power in Delhi also marks the end of a movement that aimed to structurally remold Indian politics by rooting out corruption and oligarchy and fostering self-rule where the executive will be open to the people’s rigorous scrutiny. But critics aver the movement had lost steam in its infancy, not so much because its goalposts were unattainable but because the electrifying slogans seen during the 2011 anti-corruption movement that sired AAP, were just that: mere slogans.
After Kejriwal was elected chief minister for the second time in February 2015 (he became chief minister for the first time in December 2013 heading a minority government but resigned in February 2014 after failing to table the Jan Lokpal Bill), his tendency to concentrate power began to manifest, as did his political hubris. In April 2015, he expelled the AAP’s founding members Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav for anti-party activities, though the underlying intent was to cement his hold on power. The AAP’s egregious emulation of playbook politics, which it decried to rise to power, is now being cited as a key reason for its downfall. Anna Hazare, who led the 2011 protests against the then-UPA 2 Government, said the AAP lost after becoming “tangled in liquor and money.”
“When you come to power on a very high bar that you set and what you believe should be the yardstick of measuring the entire political ecosystem, then you have to be ready to be evaluated on the same criteria,” political commentator and erstwhile Congress leader Sanjay Jha told The Diplomat. “Whatever allegations came up, proven or unproven, they did dent the image.”
According to Jha, the BJP may have orchestrated the hounding of the AAP as a strategy: “blot them as much as you can and a lot of that will stick even if they cry vendetta.”
Whether or not the AAP was a purveyor of change, it had accomplished a goal that no other party in India has in the past decade: consecutively defeating the BJP in a bipolar contest. In the end, however, the AAP’s popularity waned over graft charges and its inability to offer a transformative economic vision. Meanwhile, the stellar victory of the BJP despite its many transgressions underlines the lack of interest in the democracy question in the electorate’s psyche.
The Delhi lieutenant governor’s tendency to hijack executive powers was paraded unabashedly in public throughout the AAP’s tenure. In 2015, the Modi government excluded bureaucratic services from the jurisdiction of the Delhi government. It was only in May 2023 that India’s apex court restored it. But the same month, the Modi government promulgated the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Ordinance, which bypassed the Supreme Court verdict and placed services under federal jurisdiction.
Kejriwal once publicly berated the LG as a “headmaster” and opined that “even my teachers have not checked my homework the way the LG does. He keeps sitting on files as though the handwriting is not good, the spellings are incorrect…”
In August 2022, the Central Bureau of Investigation began raiding the premises of AAP leaders as it probed charges of irregularities in the Delhi government’s now-withdrawn excise policy. The AAP described the raids and subsequent arrests of its leaders as politically motivated, but interactions with a cross-section of the public indicated it failed to build a commanding narrative of victimhood that could provoke voter backlash against the BJP.
On the contrary, the BJP, helped by India’s primetime TV, which is notorious for promoting far-right discourses, limned an image of the AAP as corruption-laden and ineffective, igniting widespread voter saturation with Brand Kejriwal. The common refrain was that after an initial overhauling of the education and healthcare sectors, the AAP offered nothing beyond sops and freebies.
Public exasperation grew over the AAP’s failure to contain Delhi’s marked pollution, prevent flash floods, or redress water contamination in the Yamuna River. The electorate, especially the middle class which constitutes 40 percent of Delhi’s population, moved in steady trickle toward the BJP, even as its manifesto, like the AAP’s “15 guarantees,” was a handout of poll-time blandishments: free education for needy students from pre-primary to post-graduate education in government educational institutions, 2,500 rupees ($28.5) per month to women from poor families, and a life insurance of 1 million rupees ($11,390) for auto and taxi drivers.
Voices from the ground upheld what many political observers long feared: that the people are more likely to acquiesce to the BJP than rebel against it over its executive overreaches. A Delhi University undergraduate student, who did not wish to be named, had this to say about the chief minister-lieutenant governor rivalry that played out every day in Delhi: “The LG interferes with the working of the [AAP] government, and that is avoidable. But if that were to critically affect administration, let the BJP come to power… the two offices [of the chief minister and the lieutenant governor] will have political synergy then.”
The AAP made mistakes, and each time the BJP leveraged it. Chief among them was the lavish renovation of the chief minister’s 6 Flagstaff Road bungalow, which the BJP dismissed as “sheeshmaal” or glass palace. BJP Delhi President Virendra Sachdeva alleged that though the 2022 CAG report documented an expenditure of 338.6 million rupees on the residence, the actual cost was significantly higher, around 750-800 million.
At a public meeting in New Delhi in January, Modi said, “I could have built a sheeshmahal (glass palace) too, but I chose to build more than 4 crore [40 million] homes for the poor.” He described the AAP as an “aapda” or calamity. A barrage of communal innuendos followed. The Delhi BJP’s X handle circulated posters which had Kejriwal’s face morphed into the body of what looked like a Mughal ruler.
The AAP attempted some last-minute damage control by accusing the BJP government in adjacent Haryana of poisoning Yamuna water. On January 27, Kejriwal said, “The people of Delhi get drinking water from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh… but the Haryana government has mixed poison in the water coming to Delhi from the Yamuna and sent it here.”
But its defense collapsed in the face of frontal attacks from the Congress. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi lashed out at Kejriwal in the middle of the Yamuna row, pinning all blame on him. “I challenge Kejriwal: Go, drink the water of Yamuna… Today, the whole of Delhi knows that Kejriwal has committed the biggest liquor scam,” he said. In 13 seats that the AAP lost, Congress polled more votes than the BJP’s victory margin. This included Kejriwal’s New Delhi seat, from where he had been a legislator thrice.
In terms of popular votes, the AAP at 43.57 percent and the BJP at 45.56 percent were neck and neck. This makes the Congress’ role as a spoiler glaring. There was a meltdown from a section of liberals against the Congress, but the party spokespersons curtly replied that it was not their job to make the AAP win. This brazen disregard for Opposition unity has the potential to undo the 2023 INDIA initiative, a multi-party opposition alliance that many credit for reducing the BJP’s tally in last year’s Lok Sabha election. The opposition can ill-afford being seen as internecine warring factions. That will immeasurably aid the BJP’s narrative that there is no alternative for governance.