In the past few years, India has witnessed how the Opposition space is changing significantly across the states. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is carrying forward its winning spree, wherever the fight has been between the Congress and the BJP, the vote share of the grand old party is getting shifted towards other political parties.
In this, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is emerging as the clear winner. In the recent past, there have been several states where the AAP has taken away significant vote share from the grand old party. The Madhya Pradesh civic poll is another important addition in this case.
Some Key Features Of The Result
The BJP swept the first phase of urban local body elections in Madhya Pradesh. The BJP received 100 of 133 civic bodies, while the Congress emerged as the key Opposition party. However, Kejriwal’s AAP and Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM have also opened their accounts. Both of these political parties drew significant votes from the Congress.
The MP civic poll was a mixed bag. Every political party has reasons to cheer and also consider setbacks. In the second round of voting, the BJP won nine seats, the Congress won five, and the AAP and an independent candidate each won one of the 16 seats in the Municipal Corporation. The BJP recorded a lead in 256 out of 347 of the civic bodies. AIMIM won seven wards, including three in riot-stricken Khargone, which saw its most recent round of inter-communal strife on 10 April. The AAP won as many as 40 wards overall. It also won the mayoral post of Singrauli Municipal Corporation.
Significance Of AAP’s Victory
The AAP launched a massive expansion plan after the historic victory in the Punjab Assembly elections this year. Significantly, apart from the BJP and the Congress, Kejriwal’s AAP is the only political party which rules two states. In the 2022 elections, it also won two seats in Goa. The AAP first fought the Singrauli Assembly elections in 2018 and Rani Agarwal was the candidate of the party. In that election, Ramlallu Vaishya of the BJP won with around 25 percent of the votes. In the second position, Renu Sahu of the Congress got 22 percent of the vote, and significantly, Rani Aggarwal of the AAP also received 22 percent of the vote. While Aggarwal got 32,167 votes, Sahu got 32,980 votes. In this election, as the support of the Congress shifted towards the AAP, the BJP was defeated. This time, Agarwal has become the mayor of Singrauli Municipal Corporation, the first AAP mayor in India.
Madhya Pradesh is not the only state where such a trend has been witnessed. In the recently held Assam civic polls, Kejriwal‘s party won two seats. Similarly, the AAP also did well in the Gujarat civic poll. Last year, the AAP put in a spectacular performance in the civic polls of Surat and Gandhinagar. In the Gandhinagar municipal corporation elections, Arvind Kejriwal’s party won around 22 percent of the votes.
In both these states, Kejriwal’s party gained from taking away the votes of the Congress. In the Gujarat civic polls, the vote-share of the Congress came down from 47 percent to 28 percent. Kejriwal‘s party did well in Surat, where it received around 28 percent of the vote; likewise, it received 17 percent in Rajkot, 8 percent in Bhavnagar, and 7 percent in Ahmedabad municipal elections.
AAP’s Determination And Consistency
The emergence of the AAP in Madhya Pradesh is also another example of its determination and perseverance. After all, in 2013, the party tried to establish its base in the state but failed.
Then, despite losing every seat in the 2018 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, the AAP did not lose the ground connection and kept working. Kejriwal‘s party held a massive membership drive in the state. The first phase of the drive was named “Mission Buniyaad”, and the next stage was named “Mission Vistaar”.
The AAP also showed a similar determination in a state like Goa. In the last Assembly elections, the party fought with full strength but lost miserably. It stayed on the ground, developed grassroots connections and fought the 2022 Assembly elections, where it won just two seats.
India has seen how the Trinamool Congress, led by Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, landed in several states, including Goa, Tripura, and others, just before the elections, without doing any groundwork and attempting to win. The AAP, on the other hand, maintains its consistency in giving time to build an organisation from the grassroots. This is the only model of politics that can strengthen a political party in any state. And this is also the best way to gain the confidence of the voters.
AAP Has Established A Strong Poll Pitch
To win an election, a political party needs to put forward a model or a pitch that is different from the ruling party. The Congress has become redundant over the years. The only political pitch of the party is to defeat Narendra Modi. State after state, it has been witnessed that the pitch is not working. The AAP has come up with a new model to offer. The BJP and other political parties allege that this is a pitch for “freebies”. Recently, PM Modi himself pointed out the “Revdi culture”, which means “freebies”. But Kejriwal is determined to keep the focus on this political pitch. Significantly, such a model is getting a lot of acceptance among the voters.
In Madhya Pradesh, the AAP focused on the issues of the condition of roads, electricity, water and employment. On 26 June, it released its poll manifesto. The party focused on the benefits of free electricity and water, along with corruption-free municipal corporations in the state. The AAP also aggressively promoted its education model in Delhi and how it developed government schools during its tenure. These issues found acceptance in Punjab, within some sections of voters in Goa, and elsewhere as well.
The rise of the AAP and the AIMIM demonstrates that hard-core Congress voters are growing dissatisfied with the grand old party. This should worry the Congress more than the BJP because, at the end of the day, the AAP will take away the votes of the former and not much of the saffron party.
The author is an independent journalist and columnist based in Kolkata and a former policy research fellow at the Delhi Assembly Research Centre. He tweets as @sayantan_gh. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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