NEW DELHI // Given a choice between an established party that runs the country and an upstart that has jilted Delhi once already, voters in India's capital appeared to have selected the latter on Saturday.
Exit polls released after voting in most areas had ended showed the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), founded on an anti-corruption plank in 2012 by the activist Arvind Kejriwal, winning more seats than the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A poll conducted by the Cicero agency gave the AAP between 35 and 43 of the assembly’s 70 seats, and the BJP between 23 and 29.
Another, by Axis, showed a massive 53 seats for the AAP and only 17 for the BJP.
However, the findings of another agency, CVoter, suggested the race between the two parties might yet be tight enough to yield a hung assembly.
The CVoter poll indicated between 31 and 39 seats going to the AAP and between 27 and 35 for the BJP.
An outright win for the AAP will be the first electoral setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he led the BJP to a landslide win in national elections last year.
Mr Modi was drafted into the BJP’s Delhi campaign after pre-election surveys showed strong support for the AAP.
“We are looking at an election which could be a wave election, which could even be a landslide election,” Yogendra Yadav, an AAP leader, told the news channel NDTV on Saturday afternoon, hours before polling closed. “There is a contest in the middle class areas, where every vote can matter. But outside the middle class areas, it is clearly one-sided.”
Kiran Bedi, the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate, told the media in the afternoon that she was sure her party would win. “We should wait for the results till February 10 ... The condition of Delhi is shameful right now. The truth will win on the 10th.”
Opinion polls before the election had put the AAP and BJP neck and neck, and exit polls in previous Indian elections have sometimes been wide off the mark.
Voter turnout was high, with roughly 67 per cent of nearly 12 million registered voters casting their votes. In comparison, the turnout was 65 per cent in December 2013, when Delhi last voted for its assembly.
That election saw the BJP win 31 seats, followed by the AAP with 28. The Congress Party, which ruled Delhi for the previous 10 years, finished a distant third with just 7 seats.
Despite coming second. the AAP was able to form a government after the Congress offered its support from the outside.
A decisive result from this election will end a year of limbo following Mr Kejriwal’s resignation as chief minister last January after a 49-day stint in power. Since then, Delhi has been administered by its lieutenant governor as it waited for fresh elections.
The intervening year was put to good use by the AAP, said Pradip Dutta, a political science professor at Delhi University.
“They’ve built a large base of volunteers, and these volunteers and their leaders have been consistently talking to the poorer sections of Delhi in particular, keeping in touch with them.”
In its campaigns, the AAP has targeted Delhi’s poor, offering them free electricity and promising to eliminate political corruption and to regularise many of the city’s unauthorised tenements.
Given the BJP’s hold over the national government and the stature of Mr Modi, it would be tempting to think that Delhi would vote for India’s most powerful party, Mr Dutta said. THE commonly held line of logic is that voters wish to fall into the slipstream of such clear dominance, hoping to benefit from it.
“But here I think they’ve been seeing a certain commitment on the part of the AAP, so I don’t think it’s a logic-defying exercise to vote for them,” Mr Dutta said. “It isn’t like they will be going in for a loser despite Modi doing so brilliantly.”
M Ramachandran, a 74-year-old retired scientist, walked early to the polling booth, hoping to avoid the queues because of his bad hip. “But there were already people there when I reached at 8am,” he said.
Mr Ramachandran said he voted for the BJP in the national election last year. But on Saturday he seemed to prefer the AAP, although he would not say which party he had voted for.
“It’s important that we have new parties in the mix, I think,” he said. “With only the Congress and the BJP on the scene, we have very little choice. The parties get complacent and corrupt. They need to be told that politics can’t be only their game.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
