Kejriwal's House of Cards collapses as BJP storms Delhi

After 27 years, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed the throne of India’s capital, Delhi, defeating India’s most successful start-up, the Aam Aadmi Party, led by Arvind Kejriwal.

Eventually, Delhi got fed up with Kejriwal’s daily soap opera of using his lack of powers as an excuse for not delivering on any of his promises.

Kejriwal ran out of alibis for his utter lack of delivery while being enmeshed in one corruption scandal (liquor gate, Sheeshmahal) after another. His preoccupation with his luxury lifestyle — as a self-styled Aam Aadmi who swore never to live in a CM’s bungalow but ended up building a luxury palace — and his stint in jail on corruption allegations made for the worst optics.

For a man who had risen in politics by making wild allegations of corruption against the entire Congress Party leadership and claiming to be “kattar imandar” (fiercely honest), he left the voter underwhelmed.

Corruption, Chaos, and Collapse

None of this and the Delhi result will come as a surprise to my beloved readers of SWAT analysis, as I had predicted the results in my last column. The real issue is that Kejriwal actually dragged Delhi back by 15 years.

In some ways, Delhi voters pressed the EVM over the miserable quality of life we suffer in Delhi — with poison air, gridlocked traffic, rampant garbage mountains remaining uncleared for months, erratic electricity supply, irregular water supply, a dead Yamuna, and rampant encroachment organised by corrupt leaders and agencies.

We are practically prisoners in our homes with terrible law and order, and Delhi being totally unsafe for women. Worse, we have had no creation of any infrastructure of note, public commons, parks, or public facilities that showcase the fact that Delhi is the national capital of the world’s fourth-largest economy.

A woeful slum

The Delhi voter seemed to realise that basic freebies promised by both the AAP and BJP were not enough, and it was up to the voter to demand more for India’s face to the world, which currently looks like a woeful slum.

Make no mistake, the election was a referendum on Kejriwal, as the BJP did not enter the elections with a declared CM face, and the Delhi state leadership has been extremely weak for decades. Yet the central BJP, led by Modi, worked with vim, sensing victory, and went all out to score.

So carried away was Kejriwal in his hubris and his maximalist political ambitions that no alarm bells rang for him when his stint in jail drew no ire from the Delhi voter. Kejriwal had already purged AAP of all those he considered a threat to his leadership and was left with a near cult of second-rung leaders, none of whom had any credibility or traction with the voters.

All they did was glorify Kejriwal 24/7, trying new theatrics to outdo each other — such as Atishi Marlena, Kejriwal’s nominated CM, who dramatically refused to sit in the CM’s chair in front of television cameras.

Kejriwal claimed that he would clean Delhi’s poison air — by most yardsticks, the worst AQI in the world — if he was given power in Punjab. Despite AAP getting power in Punjab, Delhi’s air remained poison.

Too-clever-by-half politics

AAP was also done in by its lack of political ideology and too-clever-by-half politics. Kejriwal tried to be Hindutva-lite and kept mum when minorities were attacked and when riots broke out in Delhi. Kejriwal seemed to be the “B” team of the BJP as it cut into opposition vote shares in states where it had no vote share, such as Goa, where it contested against the Congress.

Kejriwal viciously attacked the Congress, calling it a “joke,” while it was contesting against AAP in Delhi.

As I predicted, the Congress ended up as a dud in Delhi because it basically fought the election reluctantly, barely putting up a fight. The Congress Party is a case study in a total lack of will to power, in contrast to the BJP, which fights to the last vote. No wonder both parties get very different results.

Hopefully, AAP’s daily drama will now be at an end, and Delhi will finally get the governance it so desperately needs, with the Lieutenant Governor and the BJP CM working in cohesion.

At least the BJP will have no excuses left for the pathetic state of Delhi.