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In the wake of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s decimation in the Haryana Assembly elections, its senior state leaders said the party will soon hold a meeting to discuss its organisational affairs before turning its focus to the upcoming municipal polls in the state.
The AAP’s Haryana vice-president Anurag Dhanda attributed the party’s disastrous performance to the absence of its national convener Arvind Kejriwal, who had been in jail in connection with the Delhi excise policy case. However, an analysis of the 11 seats where the former Delhi chief minister held campaign events shows that the party, while drawing a blank there too, got more votes than the winning margin in five such seats, which especially dented the prospects of the Congress.
The Haryana polls saw the incumbent BJP clinching it for the third consecutive time, bagging 48 seats out of 90 as against the Congress’s 37 seats.
Both the AAP and the Congress are part of the Opposition INDIA alliance, but, unlike the Lok Sabha elections, they could not reach a seat-sharing deal for the Assembly polls in the state.
Released from Tihar jail on bail on September 13, Kejriwal had begun campaigning in Haryana on September 20.
On Friday, Dhanda said the AAP would soon reorganise the state unit to prepare for the municipal elections. “The Assembly election was a bipolar contest and people wanted to replace the BJP. However, the Congress’s high-handedness resulted in its defeat and it couldn’t consolidate non-Jat votes. We couldn’t perform well because Kejriwal ji was behind bars and got bail a day after the final day of nomination,” he said.
It is a different matter that after contesting from 89 of 90 seats, the AAP failed to open its account and got just 1.79% of the vote share.
Dhanda, who had contested from the Kalayat seat and polled 5,482 votes to finish more than 42,000 votes behind the Congress winner, further said if the party had more time, it could have repeated its performance in Gujarat where, in the 2022 Assembly polls, it had bagged five seats and 12.92% vote share. “We had four months during the Gujarat polls. But the BJP’s plan to keep Kejriwal ji away from Haryana resulted in this,” he said.
In the 11 Haryana constituencies where Kejriwal campaigned – Ballabgarh, Assandh, Rewari, Badshahpur, Bhiwani, Pundri, Meham, Kalayat, Rania, Dabwali, and Jagadhri – the AAP’s best finish was third place in three seats (Rewari, Bhiwani, and Jagadhri). The AAP ended up at fourth place in one seat, fifth in five seats, and seventh and eighth in one seat each.
