Number Theory: How hyperlocal were the 2025 Delhi assembly elections?

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Published on: Feb 13, 2025, 08:23:40 IST

By Roshan Kishore, Nishant Ranjan

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Delhi is one of the most densely populated urban clusters in India. This also means that assembly constituencies (ACs) are among the smallest in terms of area. This opens up a possibility that hyper local electoral issues overwhelm everything else. Was this the case with the 2025 Delhi elections? Or did Delhi vote from a macro anti-incumbency sentiment?

BJP supporters celebrate the Delhi election results on February 8. (Arvind Yadav/ HT Photo)

HT has compared the results of 2020 and 2025 assembly elections with the 2022 Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections to try and answer this question.

How hyperlocal were the 2025 Delhi assembly elections?

AAP’s seat share fell between 2022 MCD and 2025 assembly elections despite a rise in vote share
Delhi has three local bodies: Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and Delhi Cantonment Board. Of these, MCD is the biggest and its wards cover 68 out of 70 ACs in Delhi, except New Delhi and Delhi Cantonment. Because the existing MCD came into being after a delimitation of wards and merging of three separate bodies, the 2022 MCD results cannot be compared with past results. If one were to extrapolate the 2022 MCD results at the AC-level – add votes in wards within the same AC – and compare the vote share and seat share numbers with the 2025 assembly elections, an interesting pattern emerges for the AAP. Its vote share increased by 1.5 percentage point between the 2022 MCD and 2025 assembly elections but its seat share fell by 22 percentage points. The biggest reason for fall in AAP’s seat share despite an increase in vote share between 2022 and 2025 is that BJP’s vote share increased by a bigger amount.
Headline vote share comparisons between 2022 and 2025 hide differences in AC-level trends
A comparison of AC-wise results for the 2022 MCD results and 2025 assembly election results shows that the headline vote share comparison does not tell us the entire story. Out of the 68 ACs for which MCD and assembly results can be matched, the AAP lost vote share in 35 ACs between 2022 and 2025. It was AAP’s gain in the remaining 33 ACs which led to an increase in its overall vote share between 2022 and 2025. The BJP, on the other hand, gained vote share in 60 out of the 68 ACs between 2022 and 2025. Vote share of non-BJP non-AAP parties fell in 62 out of the 68 ACs between the 2022 and 2025 elections.
And MCD anti-incumbency seems to have played a role in 2025 results
If one were to make a matrix of ACs won by the BJP and the AAP – no other party has won any seat – by change in the BJP’s performance between 2020 assembly to 2022 MCD elections and 2022 MCD to 2025 assembly elections – it gives four categories: increase: increase, increase: decrease, decrease: increase and decrease: decrease – only 20 out of the 48 ACs won by the BJP in 2025 saw an improvement in its vote share between both 2020-2022 and 2022-2025 elections. Twenty-five of the ACs won by the BJP are those where its vote share fell between 2020-22 but went on to increase between 2022-2025. This is where the BJP really made an effort to improve its performance. In another seven ACs, the BJP’s vote share increased between 2020 and 2022 but fell between 2022 and 2025, suggesting that it frittered away the gains of the MCD elections. If one reads these numbers with party-wise MCD seat shares in these AC categories, BJP’s worst and best performance (excluding Ballimaran, which is a Muslim-dominated AC) seems to have come in AC categories where the AAP’s seat share was the lowest and highest in MCD elections. This suggests a role of MCD-driven anti-incumbency for both the BJP and the AAP.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roshan Kishore
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.Read More
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nishant Ranjan
Nishant Ranjan has been working as a data journalist with Hindustan Times since 2023. In this short period, he has established a niche for creating original datasets and utilising them to produce journalistic work that pushes the boundaries of journalism. The list of datasets and stories done by him include the following: a dataset of all 717 chief ministers India has had since 1952, a dataset of all 3,350 members of India’s council of ministers, a dataset of all 190 deputy chief ministers in India and a dataset of all 279 Supreme Court judges in India (1950-2025). He has also profiled each elected Muslim MLA/MP since 1952. He is a mining engineer by training who decided to pursue a Master's in Development Studies from TISS after working in a coal mine for 10 months. He also worked as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, researching local governance in India. He also has a keen interest in analyzing electoral politics and political executives in India.Read More