What swung the vote in Delhi polls: Class

The national capital is home to a phalanx of central and state government workers, as well as among the largest pool of salaried class employees in India

In the heat and dust of India’s electoral landscape, the middle class appears perennially aggrieved. Largely composed of people who are salaried and decently off, come from urban or peri-urban backgrounds, and largely upper and dominant caste backgrounds, this group of voters often finds itself numerically outgunned in the electoral mathematical calculations of political parties. They may be more amorphous in their income distribution, but remain tethered by similar caste backgrounds, aspirations for mobility, governance concerns, and everyday civic requirements.

BJP supporters celebrate outside the Delhi BJP office. (Arvind Yadav/HT)

Delhi is an exception. The national capital is home to a phalanx of central and state government workers, as well as among the largest pool of salaried class employees in India. The share of salaried workers in Delhi is 56%, compared to the national average of 22%, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey. Some estimates say the so-called middle class in Delhi comprises nearly a third of the population of the Capital. In other words, unlike in any other part of the country, the middle class (and consequently upper castes) holds numerical and electoral heft in the Capital.

This is one of the driving factors behind Delhi’s increasingly bipolar electoral behaviour over the past decade – a landslide in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and 2019, and an equally decisive shift towards the Aam Aadmi Party in the assembly elections in 2015 and 2020. Enabling this swing is a sizable chunk of floating voters – beyond the core bases of the two parties – who come from the middle class and switch between nationalism and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal in the Lok Sabha, to improved delivery of services and better civic services promised by Arvind Kejriwal in the local. The AAP’s victory in a large swathe of middle-income colonies in south and west Delhi was dependent on this switch.

On Saturday, the pendulum swung. Disillusioned by the crumbling civic services in Delhi, mounting corruption allegations against the AAP, unkept poll promises caught in the tangle between the elected government and the lieutenant governor, and freebies for just about everyone else, large chunks of the middle class abandoned their voting behaviour from 2015 and 2020, and remained with the BJP. Fuelling their decision was also the Union government’s move to offer major tax breaks in the Union Budget just four days before polling, and the expected windfall for government workers from the 8th Pay Commission announced weeks earlier. The BJP’s localised campaign – eschewing the more communal edge that is now a common feature of the party’s outreach in other states – was designed to amplify this discontent among the middle classes, who also add to the hawa or mahaul (poll atmosphere) because of their privileged position in society.

At the other end of the spectrum were Delhi’s poor voters and slum dwellers, many of whom continued to repose their faith in the AAP and contributed to the party’s 43% vote share. These voters – many of them working class migrants, domestic workers, wage labourers, and residents of unauthorised colonies – form the electoral backbone of the AAP and didn’t abandon the party that nurtured this demographic with targeted welfare schemes and made them into a potent vote base. In a city where many of the reserved seats (think Deoli, Kondli, Ambedkar Nagar) also house sprawling slums, the voting patterns of the most marginalised castes is also a decent proxy for the poor – here, the AAP won eight of the 12 seats reserved for Scheduled Castes. In fact, a survey done by the Dalit organisation NACDOR in January found that despite a seven percentage point dip in the popularity of the AAP among Dalit communities in the Capital, they still continued to back Kejriwal’s party 44-33. In a tight election, those at the bottom of the ladder clearly continued to trust the AAP – a fact that will be critical if the party wants to rebuild itself.

In elections that were defined by the class divide, these sharply divergent political preferences also exposed a fundamental truth about the two Delhis that reside within the Capital, separated not just by circumstances or resources, but also the 200,000 or so votes among the city’s 15.6 million that made all the difference on Saturday.