AAP’s national ambitions hit speedbreakers

AAP’S NATIONAL AMBITIONS HAVE TAKEN A HUGE HIT AS THE PARTY FAILED TO MATCH ITS OWN EXPECTATIONS IN PUNJAB AND DREW A BLANK IN GOA

NEW DELHI: The national ambitions of the Aam Admi Party (AAP) to emerge as an alternative to the BJP by expanding its footprint beyond Delhi lay in a shamble on Saturday after it came a distant second in Punjab and failed to make a dent in Goa.

In Punjab, the AAP won just 20 seats against Congress’ 77, contrary to pre-poll speculation that the party was a serious contender for wresting power in the state. The results in Goa were more disappointing for the AAP. It failed to win a single seat in a house of 40, with even its chief ministerial candidate Elvis Gomes losing.

The party that was looking to give itself an electoral boost before the next round of assembly elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh performed worse than it had done in Punjab in the Lok Sabha polls in 2014. Then it had led on 34 assembly constituencies mopping up 24.4 per cent of the total vote share. These elections the party’s vote share stands shrunk to 23.7 per cent.

The party’s most popular leader Bhagwant Mann lost to Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)’s Sukhbir Singh Badal. While the party’s state convener Gurpreet Singh Ghuggi lost too, most of the party’s turncoat candidates also got a drubbing.

Though not a complete washout, the party’s performance in Punjab fell way short of its own expectations. The party won 18 seats (out of 20) from mandi towns of Punjab’s peasant beltMalwa and two from the dalit/ NRI belt of Doaba. The party drew a blank in the border region of Majha. The party’s candidates managed second positions in another 20 seats in Malwa but only on a couple each in Doaba and Majha.

The normally combative Kejriwal struck a somber note, tweeting that he ‘bows before the people’s verdict.” He had claimed during the campaign that the AAP will win “more than 100 of the 117 seats in Punjab.” In his tweet, he said “the struggle will go on”.

Somewhat confident of a good showing, particularly in Punjab, the AAP had already set its sights on Gujarat and drawn up plans for its leader and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to tour the state every month ahead of elections scheduled at the end of the year.

But on Saturday as the results sank in, top leaders of the party went into a huddle in Delhi and Gujarat was far from their mind. “Gujarat was not even discussed. We are collecting data to analyse what went wrong and then we will focus on the municipal elections in Delhi,” a member of the party’s political affairs committee (PAC) confessed.