Delhi polls: AAP defeats BJP ally to win Burari for fourth time
Sanjeev Jha's win in Burari highlights AAP's resilience amid discontent, securing his fourth term despite a shrinking margin and broader electoral losses.
Tucked between the folds of the verdict in the otherwise inconspicuous Burari neighbourhood is the story of a fracture in the Purvanchali vote – millions who migrated to the Capital from towns and villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in search of work between the late 1980s and 2000s.
But it also captures the political resilience and relevance in the national capital of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Sanjeev Jha. He won a fourth straight term from the Burari assembly constituency in the Delhi elections – emerging as one of a tiny clutch of leaders of Delhi’s ruling party who bucked widespread disenchantment against the outfit and tightening his electoral bond over migrants from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Election Commission of India (ECI) data showed that the AAP won or was leading in just four of 12 such Purvanchali-dominated constituencies. In 2015, Jha eased to a 70,000-vote win over the BJP, and then an 88,000-vote win over the JD(U) in 2020. This time, the margin shrunk -- Jha won by 13,712 votes, fending off the Janata Dal (United)’s Shailendra Kumar in one of just two constituencies that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) shared with its allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Jha secured 121,181 (47.57%) of the 254,737votes polled in the segment, 20,601 more than Kumar, showed data from ECI.
The 45-year-old Jha’s win emerged as a rare bright spot in an otherwise bruising election for the AAP where an overwhelming chunk of the party’s brass lost their individual contests, including party chief and former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal as well as his two-time former deputy Manish Sisodia.
Jha has now won all four elections the AAP has contested since its inception in 2012.
Jha did not respond to requests for a comment.
Vilified and discriminated against as “outsiders” for decades, Purvanchali voters began to gather steam as a block in the mid-2000s. But it was controlled by a single political party for years till Jha emerged on the electoral space as a young upstart on an AAP ticket in 2013, when he knocked back the BJP’s incumbent MLA Shri Krishan Tyagi by over 10,000 votes. That win saw the Purvanchali vote coalesce around a Purvanchali candidate in an area where the migrant population had swelled significantly.
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