A stupendous rise and a shuddering downfall – eight months after LS polls
New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party's stupendous victory over the Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday showed the state of the saffron party just months after it swept all seven Lok Sabha seats in the Capital during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, with a vote share of 56.53 per cent. In comparison, the BJP was able to manage only 38.51 per cent of the votes polled in the Delhi Assembly election, a dip of nearly 20 percentage points; whereas the AAP has increased its vote share compared to 2019 by a whopping 35 percentage points.
While the saffron party did perform better in comparison to its 2015 assembly election results when it bagged only around 32.19 per cent of total votes polled. However, the increase in BJP's seat share from three in 2015 to eight in 2020 has affected AAP's vote share which marginally dipped to 53.57 per cent from 54 per cent in 2015 when it was victorious on 67 of the 70 assembly constituencies.
What is more interesting is that in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the BJP had won almost all seven parliamentary constituencies with margins of several lakh votes, but a Lok Sabha seat-wise division shows that the BJP's vote share in seats it won just months ago
had drastically reduced. For example, in North-West Delhi, where the BJP had got the maximum vote share in 2019; this year, the party has secured around 40.43 per cent of the votes polled; whereas the AAP has scored 52.03 per cent in the area where they had secured only 16.88 per cent of votes in 2019 — a nearly 36 percentage points.
Moreover, in areas like North East Delhi, where a lot of the anti-CAA protests had turned violent owing police crackdown on protesters, the BJP's vote share has reduced by over 20 percentage
points to 33.76 per cent; whereas the AAP's vote share increased to 53.6 per cent. Interestingly, areas like Seelampur and Mustafabad where most of the violence was
seen had also recorded some of the highest voter turnout numbers.
In West Delhi, which is represented by BJP MP Parvesh Verma, the saffron party's vote share has come down by more than 20 percentage points to 40.14 per cent from 60.01 per cent in the 2019 parliamentary election. Curiously, Verma had been one of the BJP's star campaigners who had earned significant notoriety for polarising the Shaheen Bagh anti-CAA protest — both from the public and the Election Commission of India, which had first ordered him off the party's star campaigner list and then banned him for violating the Model Code of Conduct twice. AAP's vote share here has jumped from 17.46 per cent to 54.53 per cent.
This trend is seen across other Lok Sabha constituencies as well. In the New Delhi Lok Sabha segment, AAP increased its vote share from 16.33 per cent to 57.32 per cent and BJP's share came down to 38.14 per cent; in East Delhi parliamentary segment,
AAP's vote share increased to 50.44 per cent and BJP's vote share decreased to 42.36 per cent; in South DelhiLok Sabha seat, AAP's share increased to 54.41 per cent and BJP's came down to 37.54 per cent and Chandni Chowk Lok Sabha segment has seen the best improvement of AAP's vote share as BJP's share dropped to 37.68 per cent.
