Delhi voters were satisfied with performance of Central govt. Premium

This time, there were no winds of change in Delhi. Whether the stranglehold of the BJP will loosen in the upcoming Assembly elections remains to be seen

Delhi did not witness the changes that we saw in its neighbouring States of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Rajasthan. Delhi voted the way it did in the previous two general elections, though its overall vote share dipped marginally. The combined vote shares of the INDIA alliance (the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party) improved by a few percentage points compared to 2019. Yet the INDIA alliance’s combined vote share was 11 points lower than that of the BJP.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got a lot of support from the upper castes and Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Among the Dalits, the BJP’s vote share was roughly equal to that of the INDIA alliance (Table 1). The BJP received one-seventh (14%) of the Muslim vote — double its all-India average vote share among Muslims. The combined vote share of the INDIA alliance was substantially high among Muslims (83%). The BJP did well across class categories.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest and the AAP’s slogan, “Jail ka jawab vote (the answer to jail is vote)” turned out to be a non-issue: three-fourth (76%) of the respondents said it hardly affected their vote.

Two major factors contributed significantly to the result. First, the overall satisfaction of voters with the BJP-led Central government’s performance during the last five years was high. It was clear that the respondents focused more on the Central government’s performance than the State government’s performance while voting. Close to two-third (63%) of the respondents wanted to give the BJP another chance. Second, while Narendra Modi remains popular, respondents indicated that they voted for the party. When people were asked whether they would have voted for the same party if Mr. Modi had not been the prime ministerial candidate, as many as six of every 10 (60%) said they would have voted for the party irrespective of the prime ministerial candidate. Among BJP voters, seven in every 10 said so.

This time, there were no winds of change in Delhi. Whether the stranglehold of the BJP will loosen in the upcoming Assembly elections remains to be seen.

Biswajit Mohanty is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi, and Ramzan Shaikh is PhD scholar at Delhi University