MCD Election results: How could the AAP experiment go so horribly wrong?

Now that the battle lines are drawn, it remains to be seen how Delhi govt and MCD will co-exist

Elections to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) show a complete rout of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which was relying on these polls to validate its rule over Delhi. The relationship between municipal bodies in Delhi and the Delhi government is fractured and fraught. For many years now, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has had a stranglehold over Delhi’s municipal structure, which actually lubricates the administrative wheels on which the capital is run.
 
The fervent negation of AAP – except in areas where the minority communities like the Sikhs or Muslims live in large numbers – also suggests another disturbing trend: That despite all its pretensions to cosmopolitan-ness, the city has voted along religious lines. The Muslims have voted against the BJP, and the Hindus, in most parts of the capital, for it.

 
How could the AAP experiment go so horribly wrong?
 

The party started out doing everything right. Education and health were the two big items on the agenda for a party that won 67 out of 70 Assembly seats in 2015. In its third Budget, a Rs 48,000-crore one presented earlier this year, AAP reiterated its priorities of funding education (25 per cent of the Budget), and around 12 per cent for the health sector. The party believed the Mohalla Clinic scheme would be the party’s redemption.
 
It was not just allocation of money but actual outcomes that the party would monitor, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia underlined. So it was not the construction of a foot overbridge that was important but also how many people used it.

 
But scandals, scams and terminological inexactitude eroded the AAP’s standing. Several ministers – Gopal Rai and Satyendra Jain – seen as performing ministers, were sidelined. The perception gained ground that you could only stay in the party if you sang praises of the top leadership – regardless of whether it was right or wrong. The BJP’s – much more than the Congress’ – campaign point was that AAP only pretended to be better than everyone else. It embarked upon an exercise that tore the veil from the face of AAP: Whether it was the issue of 21 legislators holding offices of profit, or corruption and nepotism scandals.

 
So that it was not seen as a clone of its earlier self, the BJP, on the other hand, did some serious course correction. It did not allow corporators to insist that they be renominated – instead, it changed many faces of the BJP in Delhi, thus giving the illusion that it was a new and totally different party people were voting for. The mascot continued to be Prime Minister Narendra Modi, eliciting the acid comment from former AAP leader Yogendra Yadav that the people of Delhi had rejected their CM and elected PM.
 
Overall, it was an unedifying election for AAP. But now that the battle lines are sharply drawn, how will the Delhi government and the MCD co-exist and work? That’s what we have to see. What is to become of Delhi? Who knows?