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Journalism of Courage
Several Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) stalwarts, starting with Arvind Kejriwal, lost the Delhi Assembly elections by margins that were smaller than the votes won by the Congress in their seats.
If Kejriwal lost from New Delhi, Manish Sisodia was defeated from Jangpura, Saurabh Bharadwaj from Greater Kailash, Somnath Bharti from Malviya Nagar, and Durgesh Pathak from Rajinder Nagar, all seats where the Congress got more votes than the winning margin of the BJP, thus affecting the result. In all, there were 13 such seats out of 70.
The BJP’s Parvesh Verma defeated Kejriwal, in a seat the AAP chief had won three times since 2013, by 4,089 votes. The Congress candidate, Sandeep Dikshit, got 4,568 votes in the New Delhi seat to finish third. In 2013, Kejriwal had defeated Dikshit’s mother Sheila Dikshit to end her reign as CM.
Verma, a two-time MP who was briefly an MLA after winning the Mehrauli seat in 2013, is also the son of a former Delhi CM, the late Sahib Singh Verma of the BJP.
In Jangpura, former Deputy CM Sisodia was defeated by the BJP’s Tarvinder Singh Marwah by just 675 votes. The Congress candidate here, Farhad Suri, got 7,350 votes. Sisodia, a three-time MLA from Patparganj, was fielded by the AAP from Jangpura as Patparganj was seen as a difficult constituency for the AAP.
In Greater Kailash, the AAP’s Bharadwaj lost to the BJP’s Shikha Roy, a two-time councillor, by 3,188 votes. Here, the Congress candidate, Garvit Singhvi, got 6,711 votes. Bharadwaj, a three-time MLA, was also a Cabinet minister under Kejriwal with the portfolios of home, health, power and urban development, and was widely expected to win.
In Malviya Nagar, another popular AAP candidate, Somnath Bharti, lost to the BJP’s Satish Upadhyay, a former councillor, by 2,131 votes. Congress candidate Jitender Kumar Kochar secured 6,770 votes.
Bharti, a practising Supreme Court and Delhi High Court lawyer, had been the sitting MLA from Malviya Nagar since 2013.
Deputy Speaker Rakhi Birla was another prominent AAP leader who lost after the Congress won more votes than the winning margin. A three-time Mangol Puri MLA, Birla was fielded from SC-reserved Madipur this time. She lost to the BJP’s Kailash Gangwal by 10,899 votes, while Congress candidate J P Panwar got 17,958 votes.
In Rajinder Nagar, Durgesh Pathak lost to the BJP’s Umang Bajaj by 1,231 votes. Congress candidate Vineet Yadav won 4,015 votes here. Pathak, a member of the AAP’s Political Affairs Committee, first won the seat in a 2022 bypoll after party MLA Raghav Chadha was nominated to the Rajya Sabha.
AAP Sangam Vihar MLA Dinesh Mohaniya lost to the BJP’s Chandan Kumar Choudhary by just 344 votes, among the lowest margins. The Congress’s Harsh Choudhary got 15,863 votes. Three-time MLA Mohaniya was jailed in 2016 in a sexual harassment case, but later acquitted.
The other seats where AAP candidates lost in a similar manner were Badli, Chhatarpur, Mehrauli, Nangloi Jat, Timarpur, and Trilokpuri.
The results are set to exacerbate the hand wringing within the INDIA bloc as many of its members had supported an alliance between the AAP and Congress, with the Trinamool Congress and Samajwadi Party also campaigning for AAP candidates. While the Congress may have spoiled the AAP’s chances in at least 13 seats on paper, it failed to win a single seat for a third consecutive time and saw its overall vote share rise only marginally from 2020.
