Delhi will elect its eighth Vidhan Sabha on 5 February, in what appears to be the sternest test yet for the ruling Aam Aadmi Party. Having made a startling electoral debut in the 2013 assembly election, and then winning almost all 70 seats in the next two, Arvind Kejriwal’s upstart party finds itself in the unfamiliar position of the besieged incumbent, with much of its senior leadership facing corruption charges. Kejriwal himself was incarcerated for five months in 2024. After securing bail, he relinquished the chief minister’s post to his most senior lieutenant, Atishi, and submitted himself to the court of public opinion.
The AAP is up against a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party, which failed to secure a majority in the 2024 general election but has since comfortably, albeit unexpectedly, held on to power in both Haryana and Maharashtra. Despite its sizeable support base in the capital, the BJP has failed to win an assembly election in almost three decades. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s response to Kejriwal’s rise has been to apply pressure from both above and below, leveraging his party’s control over the union government and, until recently, the city’s municipal corporations to constrain the Delhi government. The use of central investigative agencies and the lieutenant governor’s office has been part of this strategy.
In recent elections, Delhi’s voters demonstrated support for both Kejriwal and Modi, with a majority turning out for whosever job was on the line. Survey data suggests that almost a third of voters swing between choosing the BJP during general elections and the AAP during assembly elections. Whether or not this trend persists will determine which party the next chief minister belongs to.
Election History
The governance of the National Capital Region has been contested terrain ever since Independence. Delhi was initially classified as a “Part C” state—one of ten smaller provinces that were to be administered by a chief commissioner appointed by the union government. In 1951, these states were granted legislative assemblies, and 34-year-old Brahm Prakash, who had been one of the local leaders of the underground resistance during the Quit India Movement, became Delhi’s chief minister after the 1952 election. Four years later, however, the States Reorganisation Act reclassified Delhi as a union territory, abolishing the legislature.
Delhi served as an incubator for the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which drew its leadership and support base from Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan, who had settled in large numbers in the capital. The BJS rose to prominence by advocating for these refugees during the urban segregation that took place in the aftermath of Partition and by leading a campaign for cow protection, which culminated in a violent riot outside parliament, in 1966. Even though Delhi had banned cow slaughter in 1951, and criminalised it in 1957, the BJS had stridently opposed the establishment of new abattoirs, using the issue to accuse the ruling Congress of Muslim appeasement.
The party’s aggressive stance helped expand its base beyond the refugee community. In 1967, it won a majority in the newly created Delhi Metropolitan Council—which had no legislative powers and could only advise the lieutenant governor—with Lal Krishna Advani being elected the DMC’s executive chairperson. The BJS was one of the constituents of the Janata Party, which swept Delhi’s seven Lok Sabha seats in the 1977 general election and won 46 out of the 56 seats in the DMC election later that year. In 1993, when Delhi was once again granted a legislative assembly, the BJS’s successor, the BJP, which had further consolidated Hindu support through the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign, won 49 out of the 70 seats.
The Congress returned to power in 1998, under the leadership of Sheila Dixit, who was re-elected in 2003 and 2008. It was displaced by the rise of a new party: the AAP. Born out of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption agitation, Kejriwal’s party won 28 seats in the 2013 election, with 29.5 percent of the vote. The AAP’s biggest successes were in the New Delhi region—the epicentre of Hazare’s protests—where it won seven of the ten seats. The BJP won 31 seats and a vote share of 33.1 percent, while the Congress was relegated to third place, with eight seats and 24.6 percent of the vote. After the BJP refused to form a minority government, Kejriwal was sworn in as chief minister with outside support from the Congress. He resigned after 49 days, on 14 February 2014, claiming that the other two parties were obstructing his efforts to implement the Jan Lokpal Bill, meant to introduce an anti-corruption ombudsman. The Congress-led union government imposed president’s rule, which lasted for the next year.
During the 2014 general election, in which Narendra Modi was elected prime minister, the BJP swept Delhi’s seven seats. The AAP contested 432 seats but won only four, all of which were in Punjab. The next year’s assembly election in Delhi, however, saw one of the biggest landslides in Indian political history, as the AAP—having decided to narrow its focus to Delhi and flesh out its political platform with various populist planks—won 67 of the 70 seats, securing more than fifty percent of the vote in 54 of them. This was almost entirely the result of the election getting polarised to a head-to-head contest between the AAP and the BJP. The BJP’s vote share fell by less than one percentage point, and the AAP’s gains came at the expense of the Congress and smaller parties. Having fallen to an all-time low in the 2014 general election, the Congress saw its vote share decline to 9.65 percent in 2015, and received more votes than the margin of victory in just 13 seats—including two of the three BJP victories. The Bahujan Samaj Party, which had contested all 70 seats, also declined from 5.35 percent to 1.30 percent, while the cumulative share of minor parties and independents fell from 6.63 percent to 2.01 percent.
The 2014 and 2015 elections instituted a pattern, also seen in a number of states, that has persisted: a majority of Delhi’s voters seem to prefer Modi as prime minister and Kejriwal as chief minister. In 2019, the BJP held on to the seven Lok Sabha seats, improving its vote share from 46.4 percent to 55.9 percent. The Congress finished second, with 22.5 percent of the vote, while the AAP’s vote share fell by 14.8 percentage points, to 18.1 percent. Kejriwal has built his politics around this pattern, taking care not to alienate those BJP–AAP voters, most of whom are upper-caste Hindus. In an article during the 2019 campaign, my colleague Sagar noted that, while the AAP had begun “making overtures to dominant-caste communities,” such as Baniyas, despite initially framing its politics as caste-blind, the party “continues to be largely silent on Dalit issues. Questions of social justice have been wiped out from the political conversation in Delhi, and the AAP contributed to this political oblivion.”
This dynamic came into sharp focus a few months later, when Kejriwal and his party remained silent throughout the protests against the discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act, as well as the anti-Muslim violence that subsequently broke out in north-east Delhi. The violence took place two weeks after the 2020 assembly election, which had resulted in another AAP landslide, albeit with a slightly reduced majority of 62 seats. Much of the bloodshed was concentrated in the constituencies of Ghonda, Rohtas Nagar and Karawal Nagar—which the BJP had wrested away from the AAP—as well as in Mustafabad, which had changed hands the other way.
Once again, the Congress’s decline played a major role. The party received less than four percent of the vote in each of the four constituencies, losing 28.8 percentage points in Mustafabad—the only seat where it had finished second in 2015—10.1 points in Ghonda and 7.6 points in Rohtas Nagar. Overall, the AAP lost only 0.8 percentage points of the vote share in the 2020 election, with the Congress’s 5.4 point loss seemingly benefiting the BJP-led alliance—the Janata Dal (United) and the Lok Janshakti Party contested two and one seats, respectively—which gained 7.3 points. Only three Congress candidates retained their deposits.
The Congress did not have much ground to lose in Karawal Nagar, where its candidate had received only 5,362 votes in 2015. Kapil Mishra, the AAP legislator from Karawal Nagar, had defected to the BJP the previous year. In an apparent attempt to carve out space in his new party, Mishra had been one of the primary antagonists of the anti-CAA protesters, coining a slogan asking to “shoot the traitors” and framing the 2020 election as “India vs Pakistan.” After failing to win the Model Town seat in the election, Mishra was the key instigator of the violence, making an incendiary speech in which he threatened mob justice if the protesters were not removed by the police.
As in the 2015 assembly elections, the AAP received an absolute majority in each of the seven Lok Sabha constituencies. According to a post-election survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 68 percent of respondents believed that Kejriwal deserved another term, which was the highest pro-incumbency rating recorded by the CSDS in assembly elections over the past decade.
An overwhelming majority of respondents said that they had voted on livelihood and infrastructure issues, and the BJP’s attempt to polarise voters on the questions of the CAA and the proposed National Register of Citizens appeared to have backfired. The AAP racked up higher majorities among those who opposed the moves than the BJP managed among those who supported them. Overall, 43 percent of those who said that the protests and police violence over the past three months had been their most important issue at the polling booth reported voting for the AAP, while 38 percent supported the BJP and 19 percent voted for the Congress. However, these respondents cumulatively made up only two percent of the sample. The BJP received the support of over ninety percent of those who cited issues related to nationalism and Hindutva, but, again, only five percent of all respondents mentioned these subjects.
The demographic breakup recorded by the CSDS indicated a rather traditional polarisation between the two parties, with the BJP winning majorities among all upper-caste groups—despite losing seven percentage points among Vaishyas—as well as Jats and Gujjars, and the AAP being well ahead among Yadavs, smaller communities among the Other Backward Classes, Dalits, Muslims and Sikhs. Despite Kejriwal’s silence, over eighty percent of Muslims supported the AAP, which swept all seven seats where the community makes up more than forty percent of the electorate. Remarkably, the BJP had gained ground among most communities, usually at the expense of the Congress. The only exception, other than Vaishyas, was the Sikh community—an early indication of the AAP’s improved position in Punjab, where it would win a landslide two years later. (This was, however, compensated by the AAP losing over ten points among both Punjabi Khatris and Balmikis in Delhi.) Kejriwal’s party also won sixty percent of women and young voters, to make up for the BJP drawing almost level among men.
After suffering two landslide defeats in a row, and then losing the 2022 election for the reunified Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the BJP sought to clip the wings of the Kejriwal government by amending the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Act. The amendment placed the entire bureaucracy under the control of the lieutenant governor, who is appointed by the centre, rather than the elected government—a principle that had twice been struck down by the Supreme Court, in 2018 and 2023. The BJP also successfully obstructed the functioning of the MCD, through various legal disputes over elections to its all-powerful standing committee. Moreover, the Modi government set its investigative agencies on the AAP’s senior leadership over alleged corruption in the formulation of excise policy. The Enforcement Directorate sent nine summonses to Kejriwal for questioning and, on 21 March 2024, after the Delhi High Court rejected the chief minister’s petition seeking protection from coercive action, arrested him.
Kejriwal spent almost two months in ED custody, before being granted interim bail, on 10 May, in order to campaign in the general election. Unlike Hemant Soren in Jharkhand, he refused to resign as chief minister during his incarceration. Their arrests in the months before the election helped rally together the opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, which portrayed them as symbols of the Modi government’s undemocratic tendencies. In June 2023, Kejriwal had announced that the AAP would contest all seven Delhi seats in the general election. Shortly before his arrest, however, he had finalised a seat-sharing pact with the Congress in Delhi, even as they contested separately elsewhere. Under the agreement, the AAP would contest East Delhi, New Delhi, South Delhi and West Delhi, while the Congress would put up candidates in Chandni Chowk, North East Delhi and North West Delhi. The BJP, meanwhile, replaced six of its seven incumbents, retaining only the Bhojpuri actor and musician Manoj Tiwari, who had led the state party in the 2020 election.
Despite all the churn, and the dramatic results elsewhere, not much had changed in Delhi once the votes were counted. The BJP held on to all seven Lok Sabha seats, with 54.7 percent of the vote—a decline of 2.2 percentage points from the previous general election. The AAP and the Congress combined for a vote share of 43.3 percent, up from the 40.8 percent they had managed while contesting separately in 2019. The BJP led in 52 assembly segments, down from 65 in 2019, while the AAP led in 10 of the 40 it contested, and the Congress in eight of 30. The Congress’s Kanhaiya Kumar, who lost the North East Delhi seat to Tiwari by almost a hundred and forty thousand votes, was the only opposition candidate to lead in four segments. In North West Delhi, which is reserved for Scheduled Caste candidates, Udit Raj of the Congress, who had won the seat as a BJP candidate in 2014, led in only the reserved constituency of Sultanpur Majra, which the Congress had won in the five assembly elections before 2015.
According to the CSDS, the BJP won 71 percent of upper-caste voters and 58 percent of the OBCs, as opposed to 74 percent and 64 percent, respectively, in 2019. It won 49 percent of Dalits, a five-point increase over 2019, and 14 percent of Muslims, a seven-point gain. The party led in nine of the 12 assembly constituencies reserved for SCs, though its margins were under fifteen thousand votes in eight of them. (The average lead in assembly segments was 22,662 votes.)
Contenders
The Congress–AAP alliance did not survive the general election. The two parties contested separately in the Haryana assembly election, in September last year, which potentially cost the Congress its much expected victory—the AAP’s vote share was almost two percent, in an election where the BJP led the Congress by less than a percentage point, and the party secured more votes than the margin in five seats won by the BJP.
Kejriwal, who cautioned his party workers against complacency on the day the Haryana results were announced, soon ruled out the possibility of an alliance in the Delhi assembly election. He has gone back to his old rhetoric of the BJP and the Congress being “parts of the same rotten system” who are conspiring to prevent change. Atishi, meanwhile, has accused the BJP of “funding Congress candidates.” The Congress has also resurrected its charge of the AAP being the BJP’s B-team, with Rahul Gandhi noting in one rally that neither Modi nor Kejriwal have spoken in favour of a caste census, and Jairam Ramesh sharing an old video of the AAP leader speaking out against reservations.
On 25 December, the Congress’s youth wing filed a police complaint against Kejriwal, accusing him of criminal breach of trust and dishonesty. The complaint referred to the Delhi government’s announcement of a cash transfer scheme for women, which the department of women and child welfare claimed was not on the cards. The following day, the AAP leader Sanjay Singh said that his party would try to have the Congress removed from the INDIA. Several INDIA parties, including the Samajwadi Party and the All India Trinamool Congress, have extended their support to the AAP, rather than the Congress, in the election, while the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, has called for the alliance to be dismantled because of the acrimony.
Kejriwal’s refusal to work with the Congress is reminiscent of the AITC leader Mamata Banerjee’s decision to forego an alliance in West Bengal during the 2024 general election. In an election that is likely to be a referendum on the chief minister, letting the Congress put up its own candidates might help divide anti-Kejriwal votes more than cutting into the AAP’s vote base. The Congress has a marginal presence in Delhi—only three of its candidates received over twenty thousand votes in 2020. One of them, the former minister Arvinder Singh Lovely, has since joined the BJP, while another, the five-term Seelampur legislator Mateen Ahmed, has defected to the AAP.
An embattled Kejriwal—who faces the sons of two former chief ministers, Sahib Singh Verma and Sheila Dixit, in his New Delhi constituency—will be hoping that his party’s popular welfare programmes will outweigh the corruption allegations in voters’ minds. His opponents have promised not to dismantle his flagship schemes, even as they criticise them, and the AAP has added new offerings. Besides the cash-transfer scheme for women, it has promised free healthcare for the elderly, insurance worth Rs 10 lakh for autorickshaw drivers and monthly salaries of Rs 18,000 for Hindu and Sikh priests. In an attempt to court affluent voters, Kejriwal has promised to further empower resident welfare associations and provide them funds to hire private security.
Kejriwal has also sought to drive a wedge between the BJP and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. On 30 December, he wrote to the RSS sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—Mohan Bhagwat, asking if the Sangh supported the BJP’s alleged misdeeds, such as distributing cash to voters and purging the electoral rolls. This was not the first time that he had complained to the RSS about the BJP. On 22 September, in his first public meeting after resigning as chief minister, Kejriwal posed five questions to Bhagwat about how the BJP under Modi had deviated from Sangh orthodoxy, asking, “Has the son become so big now that it is showing attitude to his mother?” While he has by no means earned Bhagwat’s public endorsement, the tactic appears to be an attempt to woo Sangh supporters and to demotivate its cadre, who plan to organise over fifty thousand public meetings during the election campaign.
The RSS had supported the anti-corruption agitation that birthed the AAP, and Kejriwal has faced accusations throughout his political career of harbouring sympathy for the organisation. At the very least, he has been careful not to explicitly speak out against Hindutva. Besides his silence on the anti-CAA protests and the communal violence that followed, he limited his intervention during the 2022 violence in Jahangirpuri to criticising Muslim stone-pelters and not the armed Hindu procession that chanted provocative slogans, or the subsequent demolitions of Muslim homes by municipal authorities. Having faced accusations of harbouring Rohingya refugees in order to cultivate a vote bank, he responded by accusing the BJP of enabling the migration. The AAP-controlled MCD has sought to prevent refugee children from accessing public schools, with Atishi invoking nativist rhetoric to justify the move. In October 2022, when the minister of social welfare, Rajendra Pal Gautam, faced BJP criticism for attending an event to commemorate BR Ambedkar’s renunciation of Hinduism, Kejriwal did not speak out in support and instead accepted Gautam’s resignation. Yet, in December 2024, the AAP released an AI-generated video depicting Ambedkar blessing Kejriwal on his quest to defend the Constitution.
The calculus behind this approach seems to be that Dalit and Muslim voters have nowhere else to go if they want to keep the BJP out of power. In fact, Dalits have been willing to vote for the BJP in recent general elections, and the AAP’s hold on Muslims will not be as secure in the event of a Congress resurgence. Moreover, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen is expected to field up to a dozen candidates, including the former AAP councillor Tahir Hussain, who is contesting the Mustafabad seat from the Tihar jail, where he is incarcerated on murder charges pertaining to the 2020 violence. In Okhla, where the AAP’s Amanatullah Khan is defending a margin of over seventy thousand votes, the AIMIM candidate is Shifa-ur-Rehman, who, as president of the Jamia Milia Islamia Alumni Association, was a key leader of the anti-CAA protests and has been incarcerated at Tihar, since April 2020, in the conspiracy case connected to the violence.
The BJP has persisted in its strategy of communal polarisation, nominating Kapil Mishra from Karawal Nagar. Its candidates against Kejriwal and Atishi, the former MPs Parvesh Verma and Ramesh Bidhuri, also have histories of rabid Islamophobia. It has accused the AAP of enabling undocumented immigration from Bangladesh, as well as facilitating terrorism, after a bomb threat on Delhi’s schools, in January 2024, which was revealed to be a hoax by a minor seeking to disrupt classes, was followed by similar threats throughout the country. One BJP hoarding asked voters, “Where rioters rule, is that my Delhi?” However, faced with an opponent it cannot credibly accuse of Muslim appeasement, the party has kept its focus on Kejriwal’s alleged corruption, calling his renovation of the chief minister’s official residence as a “Sheesh Mahal”—a reference to the lavish architecture of the Mughals.
The BJP has also attempted the social engineering that it has successfully employed in the rest of the country. Migrants from Purvanchal—the Bhojpuri-speaking region of eastern Uttar Pradesh—are a key demographic in Delhi, believed to constitute over forty percent of the electorate. The party has sought to reach these voters by creating a Purvanchal Morcha. In November, the lieutenant governor, VK Saxena, wrote to Atishi, asking her government to declare Chhath, a popular festival in the region, as a full, rather than restricted, holiday. She did so within hours, and the BJP soon put up banners throughout the city, thanking Saxena. In recent weeks, both the BJP and the AAP have accused each other of making derogatory statements about the community. At various times, Kejriwal has accused the BJP of either purging Purvanchalis from the voter rolls or registering them as fake voters.
Besides its outreach to Purvanchalis, the BJP has sought to capitalise on the gains it made among Gujjar and Jat voters in the 2020 election. For Independence Day in 2024, with Kejriwal still incarcerated, Saxena selected Kailash Gahlot, the transport minister and a prominent Jat leader, to hoist the national flag at the official ceremony—disregarding the chief minister’s request that Atishi step in for him. Gahlot defected to the BJP in November, joining Parvesh Verma as one of the party’s Jat faces. The community, which makes up around five percent of the capital’s population, dominates over a dozen constituencies along its peripheries. Kejriwal has accused the BJP of betraying Jats over their demand for reservations and proposed that they be added to the central OBC list.
Gujjars, meanwhile, make up a slightly larger share of the population, and the BJP has named Alka Gurjar, a former state legislator from Rajasthan, the deputy coordinator of its Delhi unit, while Ramesh Bidhuri is its most prominent leader from the community. On 11 January, Kejriwal claimed to have received intelligence that Bidhuri, who was under fire for his comments about Atishi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, would soon be projected as the BJP’s chief-ministerial candidate. He congratulated Bidhuri and challenged him to a debate, while his party put up posters depicting the BJP leader as a demon, calling him the “foul-mouthed face of the foul-mouthed party.” Manoj Tiwari said that the BJP would soon make an announcement over who would be its candidate, but it is increasingly likely that, as in most recent elections, the party will rely on Modi’s popularity and make a selection only after the election.