What swung the vote in Delhi polls: Ideology
Five years ago, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) walked a deft line between the Left wing and the Right wing.
Five years is a long time. In politics, it is an eternity.
Five years ago, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) walked a deft line between the Left wing and the Right wing, careful not to be drawn into any discussion involving ideology and ducking any query about the party’s core beliefs. Rally after rally began with party chief Arvind Kejriwal’s chant, “Bharat Mata ki Jai, Inquilab Zindabad, Vande Mataram”, that attempted to showcase the AAP as an ideology neutral party focussed on governance.
There are many parties in India that practise transactional politics over ideological. But none, before the AAP, elevated it to a badge of identity. The party used it as a weapon to repel attacks from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when accused of backing the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA. Kejriwal also played up his own religious identity as a “devout Hindu”, visiting temples, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa, and lambasting Pakistan. The approach paid off handsomely as the AAP fell back on its then-impressive record of welfare delivery and swatted away any ideological inquiry.
On Saturday, that strategy came full circle as ideological vacuity came back to hurt the party that once prided itself on incorruptibility being its core ideology. As its original motto dulled under the rust of mounting corruption allegations, the party increasingly decided that a politically expedient choice was to be ideologically nimble-footed. But this strategy left the party stranded in 2025 , on the back of a tepid governance record and rising anti-incumbency . With no ideology tethering its core base, the party lost chunks of voters who were offered a better welfare deal by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). And many other voters who were inherently opposed to the AAP’s principal opponent, the BJP, found it impossible to vote for a party that appeared to have no ideological opposition to the Right-wing juggernaut.
This disenchantment with transactional politics caused a splintering in the Opposition bloc and spawned a litany of spoilers. The Congress was able to play spoiler to the AAP in 12 of the Capital’s 70 seats because clearly a chunk of the anti-BJP voters found it difficult to vote for a party that embraced politically opportunist positions on Hindutva. In one more seat, the All India Majlis–e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen marred the AAP’s chances. Spoilers claimed two of the AAP’s biggest leaders – former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal lost in New Delhi to BJP’s Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma by a margin less than the votes secured by the Congress’s Sandeep Dikshit, and former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia lost in Jangpura to BJP’s Tanvirder Singh Marwah by a margin less than the number of votes received by the Congress’s Farhad Suri.
In contrast, in 2020, the AAP had lost only three seats to spoilers, with the Congress responsible for this in two seats and the Bahujan Samaj Party in one.
The reasons for the disenchantment are not difficult to fathom.During the 2020 Delhi riots, for example, the AAP was roundly criticised for not doing enough to help the victims or stop the violence, and then for chief minister Arvind Kejriwal not going to the riot-hit areas. He and his successor Atishi routinely demonised what they interchangeably called “Bangladeshis” and “Rohingya”, taking positions that were sometimes to the right of even the BJP. Kejriwal then sacked a Dalit cabinet colleague for repeating the 22 vows prescribed by Dr BR Ambedkar, even as he put up the Indian constitutionalist’s photos in government offices and claimed he was a follower.
The 2024 general elections had shown for the BJP that pushing the pedal on only ideology without talking about governance or delivery could be detrimental, no matter how charismatic your vote-catcher. Delhi in 2025 reinforced the reverse of this notion – that expedient stances can hurt when material disenchantment in quality of life fuels anti-incumbency, that welfare or governance alone cannot navigate what is now a polity with deeply entrenched contradictions, and that such politics will give rise to vote splintering that will damage electoral prospects.
The AAP’s peculiar brand of ideology-light politics appears to have run its course, for now.
