What swung the vote in Delhi polls: Welfare
Saroja Gautam, a domestic worker, shifts her vote from AAP to BJP, prioritizing governance and water issues over welfare promises amid election campaigns.
Saroja Gautam likes calling herself “middle class”, or someone who aspires to be a part of it, since the relationship between that moniker and her current economic condition is tenuous. Living in a clump of low-income households at the edge of Jangpura in southeast Delhi, Gautam is a domestic worker and her husband Satyavan is a bus driver. The couple have a son and a daughter who they hope will become white-collar workers – “office wale babu” – one day. The children are not old enough to go to school, but the parents have already started squirreling money away to send them to an English-medium school, the first gateway in India to a better life. She regularly swats away her husband’s desire to move out of their two-room cubbyhole, telling him instead that they’ll move directly into an apartment – like the six households she services in her rounds of Jangpura Extension and Lajpat Nagar – once their children do well. Middle class is both a journey and a destination.
Gautam was never a habitual voter – her voter identity card was only useful as a document to submit in government offices – but over the last decade, she transformed into a loyal supporter of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The only reason – its steadily expanding array of welfare services that helped her trim costs and add to her children’s education fund. A pragmatist, Gautam was never particularly bothered by petty corruption that had anyway not ceased (at least in her interactions with offices) but she knew to appreciate the material changes – a mohalla clinic and subsidised drugs that saved her a trip to the hospital, free buses that opened the city for her on her one day off work, and cheaper electricity and water that slashed her household utilities bill by a third. Her favourite, though, were the improvements the government was seeding in public education and city schools. Suddenly, quality English-medium education didn’t seem so financially daunting anymore. Middle class was almost within reach.
To safeguard this dream, she didn’t budge from voting for the AAP even when her husband moved towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Worried that a new party might block off the ladder to mobility for her children – shutter the welfare schemes, in other words – she even convinced her husband to switch his vote.
Until 2025. In an election campaign dominated by competing welfare promises, it might appear ironic that her voting decision was not dictated by welfare at all. Water was at the root of it: supply was indifferent, and then sleets of monsoon water had inundated her small home several times last monsoon , a situation made worse by the floating mounds of sewage from the overflowing sewer next to their hutment.
She made up her mind when a BJP volunteer visited their cluster and told everyone that the party would give ₹2,500 to poor women. She had heard that the AAP was also promising ₹2,100 but was wary because the party had not been able to deliver on a ₹1,000 promise before. She also quickly learnt that the BJP had more promises for cheap gas cylinders, free OPD services and subsidised meals. She remembers the volunteer repeatedly saying that the BJP would not stop any schemes that were already running. Gautam also remembers returning home reassured, convinced about anti-incumbency .
Women such as her – who voted for the party because of welfare schemes – were the key architect of the AAP’s 2015 and 2020 victories. But in 2025, the BJP focussed on matching the AAP promise-by-promise, thereby hiving away a key chunk of support for Arvind Kejriwal. Battling anti-incumbency, the AAP’s tried to make these elections into a referendum on welfare. But the BJP’s strategy of offering its own freebies successfully removed the factor from the electoral consideration, allowing people to make choices not based on welfare, but governance and delivery.
Gautam, for example, was no longer worried her vote could scrap her entitlements, and therefore voted on the basis of her anger at the local authorities for not doing enough to help her marooned family last monsoon. After all, a middle-class home cannot get choked with sewage.