Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
Arvind Kejriwal

No-one could have predicted yesterday’s results when Aam Aadmi Party took everyone by storm by sweeping 67 out of 70 seats in 2015 assembly elections. That was one of the biggest ever victories in the history of Indian Politics and that sounded a lot more sweet and hopeful, considering Aam Aadmi Party was barely more than a year old.

Fast forward to today, the party has lost the charm and hopes it had given people. Yesterday, when the MCD polls results were announced, AAP was limited to 48 seats as compared to BJP’s 181. The vote share was also almost halved to 29%, which was about 54% in 2015.

Experts have various points on what resulted as the steep decline in the fortunes of Aam Aadmi Party. While reading an editorial by Yogendra Yadav, former AAP leader and now the founder of Swaraj Abhiyan, I got some real good insights about what exactly went wrong with the campaigning in these MCD elections.

Despite knowing the fact that MCD was under BJP for the last 10 years and the work was not upto the mark, evident from the fact that BJP did not field even a single sitting candidate in these elections. BJP had introduced new candidates on 267 seats out of the total 270. The election was purposefully shifted on the agenda of a personal battle between Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi. Although BJP would have wanted the same, AAP never tried to shift the focus back on business.

The campaign from Aam Aadmi Party was as always entered towards alleging BJP of its non-performance than to talk about the future plans. Even though, the AAP leadership had decided not to play the blame game in the campaign, it never really went out of sight for the party. The unwanted chitchat about the faulty EVMs again proved to be against the party and its credibility.

Arvind Kejriwal led political movement, which was considered the biggest rise in Indian Politics till a year back, failed to realise the mistake from recent loss in Punjab and Goa. In Indian politics, ranting against your political opponents can not work forever. AAP might’ve won on the same in 2015, but that came as a result of an unbeatable campaign on the ground level by AAP volunteers and also, for the fact that the people wanted to give a chance to the party which showed them big dreams.

After 2 years of the government formation, Aam Aadmi Party seems to be fading away and it will not be a surprise if a similar fate is achieved in the next Delhi assembly elections. The party needs to show some real work on the ground to have any plans of retaining the government. The government must have realised that anyone does not win on the same poll promise twice. Decreasing the rates of water and electricity might have worked once, but to be in the contention for the second time, the government needs to do more people centric works.

Mohalla Clinics and improved education in government schools has surely involved a lot more people, however, the declining image of the government and leaders has wiped off everything. The recent rant against election commission and controversies like advertisement also have resulted in a big fall in credibility of AAP as a party and Delhi government.

If the government wants to stand any chances in next elections, they need to stop the unwanted noise and focus on some hard work. Rather than being noisy about how the central government or LG are stopping them to work. Even without the things which are not directly in the control, there are a lot more more departments in the hands of the state government which could be worked upon.

By Prithviraj Singh Chauhan

Part time journalist, full-time observer. Editor-in-Chief at The Indian Wire. I cover updates related to business and startups.

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