AAP Back in the Race with Bawana Victory; BJP Lags Behind

Bawana by-poll results are out and AAP has won with a huge margin, settling the battle for political prestige. The party had not seen an electoral victory after it stormed to power in the 2015 Delhi Assembly. It lost the Rajouri Garden by-election in Delhi, the municipal corporation elections, as well as the Punjab Assembly elections.

The by-election was necessitated after AAP legislator Ved Prakash quit the Delhi Assembly just ahead of the municipal polls to join the BJP. Prakash, who had been in the BJP until 2015, fought the Assembly polls the same year as an AAP candidate, after being denied a ticket by his former party.

This did not work so well for the BJP, as the AAP candidate Ram Chander won the Bawana by-poll election by a big lead of 24,052 votes. Kejriwal’s AAP bagged 59,886 votes while BJP finished second with 35,834 votes polled by Ved Prakash. Congress finished third with its candidate Surender Kumar receiving 27,596 votes. But the vote share of the Congress has increased by 16.35%.

Bawana, one among the 12 reserved constituencies of Delhi, has over 2.94 lakh electors. It is one of the state’s largest constituencies and consists of a large number of Delhi’s villages. The constituency is semi-urban, semi-rural, with a large presence of migrants and Dalits. Bawana’s 26 rural villages have traditionally voted for the BJP, and the colonies have traditionally voted for the Congress. This changed in 2013 when the slums, too, voted for the BJP after their demographic profile changed.

Kejriwal’s AAP had won the Bawana general elections in 2015, bagging 1,09,259 votes. The victory of AAP this year shows that it is a victory of the organisation and not of the candidate. The constituency has voted for the party’s ideology and track-record in governance, implying that the AAP has managed to retain its mass base, at least in Bawana.