New Delhi: Stunning the entire country, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party on Wednesday halted the meteoric rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and delivered a crushing blow to the BJP by decimating it in a do-or-die battle for Delhi. The stakes were extremely high for both the BJP and the AAP in this electoral contest.
After getting a drubbing in the Lok Sabha polls, the AAP stormed back to political centrestage with an epic victory, that could mark a tectonic shift in India’s polity. Of the 70 Assembly seats in Delhi, the AAP juggernaut rolled in to capture 67, leaving a paltry three for the BJP, which had bagged 31 seats in the 2013 Assembly polls and all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi only nine months back.
Standing tall, this diminutive one-time tax officer also emerged as possibly the key face of the Opposition across the country. Leaders from several states, including Trinamul Congress’ Mamata Banerjee, JD(U)’s Nitish Kumar and the BJD’s Naveen Patnaik rushed to “congratulate” Mr Kejriwal, and even the Shiv Sena, the BJP’s ally in the NDA, which was humiliated by the BJP after the Maharashtra polls, described the Delhi victory as the “AAP tsunami”.
The Congress, which ran the Delhi government for 15 years from 1998 to 2013, was brought to its knees as the party not only failed to open its account in the Assembly, but its mascot Ajay Maken forefeited his security deposit, losing by a margin of over 50,000 votes from Delhi Sadar constituency.
