Number Theory: What is the AAP’s core politics?

The AAP’s decision to have an alliance with the Congress in Delhi will make it relatively immune to the voter flight towards the Congress

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has come up with a very different criticism of the recently notified rules of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, or CAA. While most opposition parties have criticised CAA on the grounds that it links citizenship with religion and can potentially (when clubbed with a National Register of Citizens) be misused, Kejriwal on Wednesday accused the Narendra Modi government of opening the floodgates for a mass migration of non-Muslims into India via CAA. Such a migration, he argued, will put a big squeeze on the economic fortunes of the local population. To be sure, this is not the first time Kejriwal or the AAP have taken an outlying political position against core ideological issues raised by the BJP. The demand for printing photos of Hindu gods and goddesses on currency notes as a way to revive the Indian economy (AAP said this during the 2022 Gujarat election campaign) is another such example. What explains this? An HT analysis shows that this is perhaps a direct reflection of AAP’s core support base being very small, and therefore the need for it to appeal to its inconstant voters.

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, PWD minister Atishi and AAP leader Somnath Bharti at a ceremony to open a flyover near Moti Nagar in New Delhi on Wednesday, (HT Photo/Sanchit Khanna)

AAP’s vote share has varied by 36.2 percentage points in the last 11 years in Delhi

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  AAP’s vote share has varied by 36.2 percentage points in the last 11 years in Delhi

  Rooted political parties, even when they lose elections, are expected to show more stability in terms of vote share rather than seat share in the normal course. This is because, in India’s first-past-the-post system of elections, seat shares can vary drastically with small changes in vote share. In the AAP’s case, its vote share has fluctuated wildly in Delhi from a high of 54.34% in the 2015 assembly elections to a low of just 18.1% in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The fact that the AAP jumped back to an almost similar kind of vote share in the 2020 assembly elections in Delhi suggests that its support base joins and deserts the AAP depending on what kind of election is being held. The AAP’s advantage, as its vote share trend clearly shows, is the biggest in assembly elections. This is definitely not a common phenomenon as far as politics in any major state is concerned.
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  Where do AAP’s voters move in polls other than assembly elections?

  Between the 2015 assembly elections and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, they moved both to the BJP and the Congress. While the BJP was a much bigger beneficiary, even the Congress’s gains were far from insignificant. Between the 2020 assembly elections and the 2022 Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections, they moved primarily to the Congress while the BJP’s vote share was largely unchanged between the two elections. In fact, a detailed analysis of the MCD results suggests that the AAP mainly lost Muslim voters to the Congress. For example, an HT analysis at the time of the MCD elections showed that the BJP and the Congress had increased seat shares in Muslim-dominated ACs of east and north-east Delhi, while the AAP had either lost seat share or did not have much, to begin with. Since it is unlikely that the BJP gained seat share because of Muslim voters, such Muslim consolidation is likely to have happened behind the Congress. The AAP’s decision to have an alliance with the Congress in Delhi will make it relatively immune to the voter flight towards the Congress, and can help it regain some Muslim votes it lost during the 2022 MCD elections, but unless it can prevent the usual voter flight towards the BJP, it cannot hope to win a Lok Sabha seat in the Capital. So, by making an odd critique of CAA, AAP may be trying to make sure that its pool of pro-Modi voters do not see it as a fundamentally anti-Hindutva party.
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  AAP’s inability to make an ideological pitch against the BJP is also its biggest political limitation

  Delhi is not the only example here. In fact, the biggest proof of this argument came in the 2022 Gujarat elections when the AAP gained a toehold in the state at the cost of the Congress rather than the BJP. While the BJP’s vote share in the 2017 and 2022 Gujarat elections increased by 3.45 percentage points, almost all of the fall in Congress’s 2017 vote share went to the AAP in the 2022 elections. That the AAP could not break the BJP’s firewall in Gujarat despite trying to outmanoeuvre it from a social welfare and right-wing flank shows that its advantage vis-a-vis the BJP in the Delhi assembly is more personality-centric (Arvind Kejriwal) than ideological. This advantage becomes irrelevant when the AAP is locked in a contest against Narendra Modi in Lok Sabha elections, since the latter is a much more popular leader than Kejriwal at the national level. To be sure, the AAP does have a state government in Punjab but the BJP is not its principal opposition there.