AAP Winning Delhi Elections Is No Ordinary Loss For the BJP

With the Delhi elections marking BJP’s 6th consecutive loss, is the party’s ‘Chanakyaneeti’ failing?

Is BJP’s ‘Chanakyaneeti’ lacking an executive?

(Photo: The Quint)

Video Editor: Sandeep Suman

The BJP losing in Delhi isn’t an ordinary loss for the party. Despite 200 MPs, crores of rupees, dozens of leaders making explosive statements and ‘Chanakyaneeti’ which made everyone think that defeating them is impossible, the 2020 Delhi elections marks their sixth consecutive defeat in the state elections.

After successive losses for the BJP, it’s important to ask whether this ‘Chanakyaneeti’ was indeed working or was there no Arjun (a central character in the Indian epic Mahabharata) to hit the bull’s eye.

Now, if you speak only of 'Gali-Goli' and Hindu-Muslim then the citizens will vote accordingly and ask 'Janab Aise Kaise?'

Arvind Kejriwal has won Delhi yet again with 62/70 seats and this will be a difficult blow for the BJP to recover from. The BJP celebrates even the smallest of victories in a grand fashion – so it's obvious that its loss will be discussed widely.

Now, one might say that the BJP has only lost the ‘Half-State’ of Delhi. Isn’t it a bit too early to point fingers at ‘Chanakyaneeti’? The numbers are the answer to this question.

This is the sixth consecutive loss for the BJP which talked about governing the country for the coming 50 years.  

Consecutively they lost Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi

If ‘Chanakya’ knows the path to victory, then how can they lose?

After the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha win, everyone thought they are invincible. In 2014, BJP had a government in only seven states but by the time we reached 2018, BJP was governing 21 states.  

It is also important to note that BJP won the 2019 Lok Sabha Polls under Amit Shah’s leadership and also ended a 14-year-exile in Uttar Pradesh and formed a government for the first time in Jammu and Kashmir. Besides these, they also won in the crucial states of Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya and Nagaland consolidating their position in the Northeast.

But invincibility in politics is a myth. The BJP, which had won almost 71% of India, has now diminished to a mere 40%.

The misery of not being able to make a government in Maharashtra shortly after sweeping the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and then losing Jharkhand, raised a finger at BJP’s tactics. The BJP won only 25 out of Jharkhand’s 81 seats. The JMM-Congress-RJD coalition formed the government. The wounds of Maharashtra and Jharkhand had just started to heal when the party was shocked by the Delhi election results despite explosive statements to the voters.

Throughout the election build-up, be it targeting Shaheen Bagh – the epicentre of anti-CAA protests – or promoting slogans of ‘Goli Maro’, BJP’s 'Chanakyaneeti' backfired.

Yogi Adityanath, Anurag Thakur and Pravesh Verma’s threats didn’t work.

Neither did the ‘current’ jibe nor calling the Shaheen Bagh protests ‘an experiment’.

The matter of the fact is that when there is someone who is getting actual work done nothing can beat it, be it hate speech, polarisation tactics or 'Chanakyaneeti'. Instilling communal fear and hatred, and using that to get votes is what made the people of Delhi ask 'Janab Aise Kaise?'