The Assembly election results in Punjab have been a telling blow to the AAP, which had started building a big hype soon after it won four Lok Sabha seats in 2014
Ajay Bhardwaj
The Assembly election results in Punjab, if anything, have been a telling blow to the Aam Adami Party (AAP), which had started building a big hype soon after it won four Lok Sabha seats in Punjab in 2014. The bubble burst decisively as the party could pocket paltry 20 of the 117 seats in the Assembly elections.
This has proved to be a major set back to the party riding the crest wave of popularity since the Delhi Assembly
elections in 2013.
A party which had built a crescendo to sweep the Punjab elections the way it had done in Delhi, stood crumbled in the face of major vote-bank shifting to the Congress after people of the state demonstrated acute apathy towards the Shiromani Akali Dal. But much to its disappointment, of the 115 candidates it had fielded, 62 of them ended up being poor third at their seats and at more than half a dozen constituencies the AAP candidates were even fourth in the tally.
At 25 seats the party candidates failed to receive even one sixth of the polled votes as a result of which they forfeited their deposits. All this happening in the background of AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal and other senior leaders making tall claims about capturing upto 100 seats in the House of 117 members.
Overall, in the vote-share, the AAP stood at the third place with around 23 per cent votes cast in its favour, after the Congress, which had 38.5 per cent of votes and swept to power with 77 seats.
Interestingly, in 2014 Lok Sabha elections also, the AAP had secured 23 per cent votes and had led in 33 Assembly segments to win four Lok Sabha seats. Apparently the vote percentage in its favour, though remained constant since 2014, but its share in the Assembly seats crumbled alarmingly.
The party faced a massive rout in the Malwa region where it was, otherwise, expected to perform brightly. Of the 69 seats in the region, the AAP could muster just 18 seats leaving a major chunk of 40 seats for the Congress to capture.
Its debacle across the state was rather too stark in the Majha region where it drew a complete blank, again leaving the Congress fly high with 22 of the 25 seats in the region.
While the election results completely exposed poor
political sense of the senior party leaders who failed to encash the overflow of resentment among people, it is believed that the AAP leaders were rather too over-confident and failed to read the people’s mind.
“The AAP may have miscalculated its support based on the huge crowds that came to listen to Kejriwal and
comedian-turned-MP Bhagwant Mann at their rallies”, said a senior AAP leader. There was also the general perception that the AAP’s campaign had peaked in the middle of last year and that it was destined to go downhill once other parties pitched their poll tents. The absence of a Chief Minister face during the campaign might have been another major factor that did not let the momentum build up in favour of the party in the end. While the Congress and the Akalis projected Capt. Amarinder Singh and Parkash Singh Badal as their faces, the AAP’s campaign looked haywire.
Most of the AAP candidates were freshers with no
previous voter connect. By the time their names were announced and the campaign picked up, there was little time left to establish their base. The party’s strategy of projecting Kejriwal as the face, while keeping its candidates in the
background, did not work. Constant infighting in the party also kept its campaign deflated most of the time.
Last August, AAP decided to throw out Sucha Singh Chhotepur, the man responsible for building the party in the state on, what many said were, trumped up charges. But it only reinforced the rivals’ allegation that Kejriwal would not let any other leader in the party become popular.
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