ELECTION// The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) trounced the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi Assembly Elections held in February. The BJP simply failed to understand its role in countering this narrative. Sikkim is the only state that has experienced such sweeps, with one party having won all seats in the Assembly elections earlier.

The AAP won 67 of the 70 seats — nearly 96 per cent. Its performance is, by far, the best ever in the state. The massive victory for the AAP in Delhi indicates the huge faith the people of Delhi have reposed in it and its relatively new leader, Arvind Kejriwal. The man who was labelled as a bhagoda for running away without delivering what he had promised to the people, has led his party to an emphatic win in Delhi.

After the massive victory of the BJP during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had continued its victory march in all the state Assembly elections held thereafter. The victory rath of the BJP has not only been halted by Kejriwal, it has been wrecked by the AAP. For the BJP it is not merely a defeat; this may be its most humiliating defeat; it managed to win only three seats and polled only 32 per cent of votes. Compared to the 2013 Assembly elections, when no party managed to get a majority, the AAP has managed to improve its tally by 39 seats, with its vote share going up by nearly 22 percentage points. On the other hand, the vote share of the BJP has declined marginally by one-and-a-half percentage points when compared to the 2013 Assembly elections, and by nearly 12 percentage points when compared to the 2014 election. The projection of Kiran Bedi as the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate to counter the popularity of Kejriwal seems to have backfired as well. She not only failed to muster additional support for the party but also lost her own election from the Krishna Nagar Assembly seat.