Steep drop in AAP’s vote share puts question mark over future
A little over two years ago, the AAP captured the imagination of Delhi, winning with a brute majority of 67, relegating the BJP to just three and the Congress to zero seats.
Cut to April 2017 and the party was seen scrambling for a second spot in elections to all the three municipal corporations of the capital.
The result will force the AAP, especially its chief Arvind Kejriwal, who was positioning himself as a challenger to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by taking him on in public discourse, to ask some uncomfortable questions. The party had projected the polls as a clash between brand Kejriwal and brand Modi. Kejriwal will need to figure how a city he had mesmerised in 2015 had since so decisively swung away from him and his ‘antipolitics’ plank.
In comparison to 2015 assembly polls, the vote share of the AAP has decreased almost by half, from 54.3% then to 26.21% in the civic polls.
Experts, however, said the party must not lose hope as 26% was still a good number. “It appears bad only when compared to its vote share in the previous election,” said Sanjay Kumar of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
On its part, the AAP said the loss was indicative of the fact that the EVMs were rigged. ››P4