By Abhik Deb
The Bharatiya Janata Party was leading with comfortable margins in all Delhi’s seven Lok Sabha seats as of 6.30 pm on Tuesday. If the leads hold, it would mean a clean sweep by the party in Delhi in three successive general elections.
The Hindutva party’s performance in the national capital looks even more impressive when seen in context of its showing in other North India states such as Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana where its seat tally has dropped significantly.
The BJP’s victory in Delhi is also noteworthy considering that the party was up against an alliance of the Aam Aadmi Party and Congress. The Aam Aadmi Party contested four of the seven seats, while the Congress was in fray in three. As Scroll reported during the campaign, a key factor in the elections in Delhi was whether the Aam Aadmi Party and Congress – rivals in the capital for a decade – could settle their differences and ensure a consolidation of their votes.
As it turns out, the combined vote share of the two parties went up marginally from 2019, but that will not prove to be enough to defeat the BJP in any of the seats. However, the margins of BJP’s victory in all of the seven seats have reduced significantly from 2019.
Congress-AAP total vote share up, but not enough
At 6.30 pm on Tuesday, the BJP had got 54.23% of the votes polled in Delhi. The number is down nearly 2.6 percentage points from the 56.85% votes the party got in 2019. But for the Aam Aadmi Party-Congress alliance to take away seats away from the BJP, it needed to ensure that the Hindutva party fell even further – probably somewhere close to its 2014 vote share of 46.4%.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
