Shikha Mukerjee | Delhi after Kejriwal: Modi’s triumph, challenge for BJP

The man of the moment, Narendra Modi, has pulled off a major victory for the BJP by winning in Delhi, after 27 years. Elections in Delhi are disproportionately important in terms of its size, wealth and status, which is that of a Union territory with seven parliamentary seats. The reason is that every party ruling at the Centre wants the governance of Delhi to reflect its success in putting an even brighter shine on its version of the Shining India myth.

The question is who will head the government and how will that government function? The long-desired Delhi victory opens up the larger and more basic issue of how a “double-engine sarkar” should function. Should it do so under the Centre’s thumb or independently, within the constraints imposed by the peculiar character of the National Capital Territory.

The past 12 years under the charismatic leadership of Arvind Kejriwal, who came on a mission to clean up the corruption-ridden swamp, where everyone had contacts and was influential to different degrees, is a complicated act to follow. He fought against the BJP targeting Mr Modi and home minister Amit Shah through the agency of the lieutenant-governor and a bureaucracy that was obstructive and failed to serve the Kejriwal government.

The decisive victory signalled by the defeats of Mr Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia is a message from Delhi’s middle class, comprising a very large portion of the BJP’s core voter base of traders, small businesses, shopkeepers and legions of Central government employees. It also reflects that Delhi voters are an entirely separate category of people; divided by their economic status, that is, class, and not by the usual divides of caste and community. To them, the payouts via the 8th Pay Commission and revision of income-tax rates matter a great deal, as does friction-free governance.

It’s also a verdict against Mr Kejriwal because he betrayed the expectations of Delhi’s poor and the modest among the middle class, the decent hard-working government employees and pensioners, who believed his promise of being transparent and clean. Therefore, finding a chief minister to step into Mr Kejriwal’s shoes will be a challenge. Whoever is selected must do two contradictory things simultaneously; appear decisive and subservient to the high command headed by Mr Modi and Amit Shah. Picking the right person, a convincing leader who is also a proxy for a job that comes with limited powers and a lot of responsibilities, will test the BJP.

The result throws up another question: how will the “vikas” model pan out in a place that is so obviously divided along class lines? Will the new BJP government throw out the AAP’s health scheme with its “mohalla clinics” as the key delivery point for services and forcibly convert beneficiaries into subscribing to the Ayushman Bharat programme? Will the BJP government overhaul Delhi’s school system to align it with new guidelines for education that the Modi government has laid down? Will the transition from one ideology to another on what are public goods, how should they be delivered and how they should be priced, as in health and education, disrupt a successful system, or will the BJP suck it up and do what Mr Kejriwal initiated?

Does all this matter? It does. The election verdict says so. It reveals the reservations of over 50 per cent of voters against the BJP in Delhi, where politics is overwhelmingly about the class divide and not so much about identity politics of caste. Against the BJP’s vote share of 46 per cent, the Opposition, though it fought separately and the Congress was a spoiler, had a combined vote share of over 49 per cent (AAP 43.5%, Congress 6.3%).

And for a very good reason: half of Delhi is middle class and the rest are mostly poor and marginalised, while the exclusive layer is made up of the filthy rich or intimidatingly powerful, all of who tend to cluster around Khan Market and other such areas. In Delhi, the people come and go and talk about RWAs and JJ colonies, the two acronyms that separate the haves from the have-nots. The class divide has been normalised by the instant recognition of who you are in Delhi based on where you live. This has been so forever. This election verifies the divide.

Is the verdict an unqualified endorsement for the BJP? Or is the verdict a big thumbs-down for Narendra Modi’s development model, his policies that are designed to establish patron-client relationships with beneficiaries also known as “labharthis”, his combative manoeuvrings, including deploying of now notorious “agencies”, that is the ED, CBI and Anti-Corruption Bureau, against an Opposition government?

The Delhi election and the result are a test for the anti-BJP Opposition, of which AAP and the Congress were uneasy allies within the larger INDIA bloc. Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah’s jibe, “aur lado”, referring to the infighting within the allies of the INDIA bloc, is a valid condemnation of the senseless strategy of splitting the anti-BJP

votes so apparent in the Delhi elections. The Congress is more to blame than Mr Kejriwal; it had no business to contest all 70 seats and it failed to focus on its enemy, the BJP. Instead, the Congress from Rahul Gandhi to the incompetent Ajay Maken bombarded Mr Kejriwal as corrupt and luxury-loving, which was an amplification of the BJP’s attack. The disastrous habit of scoring same-side goals as the Congress unabashedly does is obviously anti-alliance. By default, it is pro-BJP.

The Delhi election is a failure of the politics of the Opposition. The BJP’s success is in part a gift from the Congress, which fought Mr Kejriwal and helped the other side. The Congress strategy in Haryana, in Maharashtra and now in Delhi, is wrong. Its pursuit of the fantasy that it matters more than other parties is injurious to the anti-BJP Opposition, divided or united, whatever be its current status.

The INDIA bloc partly succeeded in 2024 by reducing the BJP to a minority in the Lok Sabha. Instead of recalibrating its strategy, the parties of the INDIA bloc reverted to the earlier dynamics, where the Congress was as much a rival as the BJP was the enemy. The Congress too, as is evident from the Delhi election, targeted the AAP, partly because it sees the party as a competitor in Punjab and elsewhere and partly because it was not sufficiently focused on its principal enemy, the BJP.

The inability to formulate strategy on how to fight is a collective failure of the anti-BJP opposition. The AAP defeat is one example. With four big states up for elections in 2026, the Opposition faces a challenge.