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Amid AAP defeat, Atishi, Gopal Rai buck the trend, hold on to seats

The BJP dealt a huge blow to the AAP. From a tally of 62 in 2020, AAP came down to 22 this election. The BJP, on the other hand, which won 8 seats in 2020, gained 40 seats and jumped to 48 this time.

AAP Jarnail Singh, Sanjeev Jha, Vishesh Ravi

(L-R) Jarnail Singh, Sanjeev Jha, Vishesh Ravi. (Source: X/@JarnailSinghAAP, @Sanjeev_aap, @iamVisheshravi)

Saturday saw several senior AAP leaders losing their seats, including party chief Arvind Kejriwal, his former deputy Manish Sisodia and former health minister Saurabh Bharadwaj. Former Delhi Chief Minister Atishi, former environment minister Gopal Rai, former food and civil supplies minister Imran Hussain as well as ex-labour and employment minister Mukesh Ahlawat were among those who withstood the BJP onslaught.

The BJP dealt a huge blow to the AAP. From a tally of 62 in 2020, AAP came down to 22 this election. The BJP, on the other hand, which won 8 seats in 2020, gained 40 seats and jumped to 48 this time.

While Atishi scraped through in South East Delhi’s Kalkaji with a margin of 3,521 votes, her victory margin decreased considerably from her 2020 battle when she won against BJP’s Dharambir Singh by a margin of 11,393 votes from the same constituency. In her first electoral outing in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from East Delhi constituency, she had lost against BJP’s Gautam Gambhir.

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Seen as a loyalist, Atishi was sworn in as a Chief Minister last September when Kejriwal stepped down from the post, passing over more senior leaders such as Kailash Gahlot and Gopal Rai. She was inducted into the Cabinet along with Saurabh Bharadwaj in 2023 when Manish Sisodia and AAP leader Satyender Jain resigned. A Rhodes Scholar who studied history at Oxford University and St Stephen’s College, she had served as an advisor to Sisodia till 2018 and was part of the initiative to revamp government schools in Delhi.

Rai, meanwhile, secured his third consecutive term from Babarpur by defeating BJP’s Anil Kumar Vashisht by 18,994 votes. Rai, the Delhi convenor of the party and a member of the Political Affairs Committee, is a founding member of AAP.

Among the other AAP leaders who also bucked anti-incumbency this time are:

🔴 Imran Hussain won from Ballimaran by a margin of 29,823 votes.

🔴 Mukesh Ahlawat won from Sultanpur Majra by a margin of 17,126 votes.

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🔴 Jarnail Singh from Tilak Nagar won by a margin of over 11,600 votes. In the last polls, he won by a margin of 28,029 votes.

🔴 Sanjeev Jha from Burari won by a margin of over 16,000 votes, down from 88,000 last time.

🔴 Vishesh Ravi from Karol Bagh won by over 7,400 votes. During the 2020 elections, his winning margin was 31,760.

🔴 Som Dutt from Sadar Bazar won by a little over 6,300 votes. His winning margin in the last elections was over 25,600.

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Among the AAP winners are four three-time MLAs — Amanatullah Khan from Okhla; Imran Hussain from Ballimaran; Ajay Dutt from Ambedkar Nagar and Gopal Rai from Babarpur.

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