Capital conundrum

medium117030681With the Election Commission firing the starter’s gun on Tuesday for Delhi assembly elections — polling on Feb 5, results on Feb 8 — it would be almost banal to note that this is another high-stakes political battle for the three main contenders: AAP, BJP and Congress. What does need to be highlighted, however, is that the stakes are the highest for AAP, a little less so for BJP and least for Congress.AAP simply cannot afford to lose this election. Even scraping up a thin majority will not be good enough as the polls will decide the political stature of Arvind Kejriwal. It needs no reiteration that his rise as a national politician began with his thumping win in Delhi in 2015.Control of Delhi’s high revenues makes it possible to project his party elsewhere. Thus, the city-state is key to Kejriwal and AAP. A loss or weak performance will dim his allure and reduce him to jostling for mindspace with the rest of the anti-BJP grouping.Delhi has given Kejriwal a huge advantage because it is not just a state, but, being the National Capital, a state with pan-India recall. Kejriwal himself has invested huge criticality to this election as he quit office last year and said he wants the voter’s clean chit on corruption to return as chief minister again.What works against Kejriwal this time is a degree of anti-incumbency after 10 years in power. Some of the original sheen has begun to wear thin. The man who came to power riding an anti-corruption wave has spent months in jail over the liquor corruption scandal, and even if some of this can be attributed to BJP’s vendetta politics, a bit of the muck may still stick.Again, for someone whose calling card involved not just an anti-corruption stance, but also claims to rejuvenation of education and healthcare in Delhi, this time the reliance is more on freebies to bring in the vote. Governance failures — not providing enough water to Delhi’s citizens and allowing air pollution to rise to worrisome levels — are beginning to show up on the negative side of AAP’s ledger.These are some of the reasons why BJP thinks it’s in with a chance this time. Past vote share trends also seem to give the party some hope. Between 2015 and 2020, AAP’s vote share dropped marginally but BJP’s saw a large swing in its favour, though this did not result in too many extra seats in the 70-member assembly. AAP got 53.6% vote share and BJP 38.5% in 2020 assembly elections. The six percentage points swing towards BJP came mostly at the expense of Congress party.BJP made further gains in 2022 Delhi municipal corporation elections, where the vote share gap between the two main contenders was just three percentage points, 42% for AAP versus 39% for BJP. BJP also defeated the AAP-Congress jugalbandi in Lok Sabha polls convincingly, winning all of Delhi’s seven seats.Now that AAP and Congress have parted company, the latter’s performance will impact the outcome in the assembly elections. In 2020, the party managed to get just over four percent of the popular vote, a slide from which it is hoping to recover this time. All signs are that Congress is not going to play dead this time. It is going hammer and tongs at AAP on every issue, from governance to corruption.Political pundits believe that AAP and Congress depend on the same vote bank of minorities and Dalits, and hence any rise in one party’s vote share may come at the expense of the other. BJP will be hoping for a slight increase — say, up to 10-12% — in Congress’s vote share, and if all of this comes at AAP’s cost, BJP could cross the finish line on its own.AAP also has to worry if its seat count is just marginally above the half-way mark. In that case, BJP could use money power to attract some of the former’s MLAs and come back to power for the first time since 1998, when Sheila Dikshit ousted the party. Congress is banking this time on Dikshit’s image, and has even fielded her son, Sandeep Dikshit, against Kejriwal in New Delhi.To sum up, AAP cannot afford to lose the Delhi assembly polls. In fact, it has to win convincingly to retain its political perch at the national level.For BJP, a loss in itself would not matter too much, as long as Kejriwal is put in his place. But a serious erosion in its own vote share would come as a blow after the convincing wins in Haryana and Maharashtra.For Congress, it would consider any significant increase in vote share as a big gain, putting it on the comeback trail sometime in the future, even if it means no major gains in seats this time.Delhi 2025 is a multi-layered fight, where national, city and municipal issues will make all the difference to who wins which seat. Voters may not be voting only on past patterns, future promises, or freebies in isolation. The race, at least at this point, appears wide open, with the third player’s performance having a disproportionate impact on the final outcome.