3 min readNew DelhiJun 5, 2024 10:45 AM IST
First published on: Jun 4, 2024 at 12:40 PM IST
The AAP will have three MPs in the Lok Sabha, bettering its tally as well as its vote share, but its celebrations remained muted on Tuesday. The party, which got 0.44% of the vote share in 2019, increased its count to 1.11%. Winning state elections by a landslide, decimating its primary opposition parties but failing to convert the mandate into similar gains in Lok Sabha polls in Delhi and Punjab has subdued party leaders.
The party’s top leadership, including party chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, is behind bars.
“We were expecting a much better result in Punjab, for sure. We can explain the results in Delhi, where we fought in alliance with Congress and made gains of five percentage points in vote share in what has been a core BJP stronghold since 2014. But Punjab has been a setback, especially since we were fighting alone and were hoping to win at least 10 seats,” said an AAP insider.
The party won four seats in Punjab in 2014, which dropped to one seat in 2019 (Bhagwant Mann).
A senior party leader said, “In Delhi, we got a higher voter share and gave a strong fight. The margins are lower. Fewer people who support AAP in the state voted for BJP in Lok Sabha… while BJP may have won, its performance is a reflection of what happened in the nation over the years.”
AAP is set to lose 19 of the 22 Lok Sabha seats it contested across the country.
Though its electoral success was limited only to three Parliamentary constituencies in Punjab, the vote share also registered a significant surge both in Delhi and Punjab where it is at the helm in the state. While it went for a seat-sharing arrangement with the Congress in Delhi, Gujarat, Goa, Haryana and Chandigarh as part of the INDIA bloc, it went alone on the 13 seats in Punjab and in two in Assam. The AAP had claimed 7.46% of the vote share in Punjab and 18.2% in Delhi in 2019; these went up to 26.07% and 24.17%, respectively.
“In Punjab, we have done much better than last time… the fourth seat was a close contest… Today no one can say that we are a flash in the pan in Punjab… We have established ourselves election by election… The other parties are much older; We are still outsiders in the system but the fact that we have won three seats and played a major role in Congress’ win in Chandigarh is an indicator that we have established ourselves as a regional party,” a senior party leader said.
AAP is trailing (Source: PTI) 
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