New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Saturday ended its decades-long electoral drought in Delhi’s Assembly elections, but a dozen of the 70 seats kept the party leadership on tenterhooks until the final results.
These were seats the BJP had not won since 2008, with nine remaining elusive since 1993—when Delhi’s first Assembly elections were held, replacing the earlier Delhi Metropolitan Council—and three slipping out of reach since their creation after the 2008 delimitation.
Among them were Matia Mahal and Ballimaran in the Walled City, along with Ambedkar Nagar, Seelampur, Okhla, Sultanpur Majra, Mangolpuri, Jangpura, and Deoli; as well as New Delhi, Vikaspuri, and Kondli—none of which had gone to the BJP since 2008.
However, the party Saturday managed to break the jinx with the BJP winning four of the 12 seats—Jangpura, New Delhi, Mangolpuri and Vikaspuri. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won the remaining eight, bringing its total tally to 22 seats.
The BJP bagged 49 out of 70 seats in 1993 when senior party leader Madan Lal Khurana became chief minister. The once dominant Congress then was reduced to just 14 seats.
BJP’s Parvesh Verma ended Arvind Kejriwal’s winning streak in New Delhi as he defeated him by 4,089 votes. In 2020, Kejriwal had won the seat by a gap of over 21,000 votes, defeating BJP’s Sunil Yadav. The AAP leader has represented the seat since 2013. Before that, Sheila Dikshit had won the seat thrice—in 1998 and 2003, when it was called the Gole Market constituency, and in 2008, when it was renamed as the New Delhi constituency post delimitation.
Five of the 12 seats—Sultanpur Majra, Ambedkar Nagar, Deoli, Mangolpuri and Kondli—are reserved for Scheduled Castes and the party’s efforts to reach out to the Dalit community yielded results, a senior party leader told ThePrint.
Many of the remaining constituencies—including Matia Mahal, Seelampur, Okhla and Ballimaran—have a sizable Muslim population.
“The reserved seats had a number of slums and, in the past, we had not been able to tap them. But the fact that PM Modi in his speeches spoke at length about giving pucca ghar to slum dwellers once voted to power and the fact that a number of welfare measures were announced for them helped us to connect with them,” said a senior BJP leader.
Moreover, BJP leaders told ThePrint that they actively countered what they called AAP’s ‘fake narrative’—that the party would demolish slums and end welfare schemes if voted to power. In the final days before polling, PM Modi directly refuted these claims, assuring voters that the BJP guarantees no slum in Delhi will be demolished and that welfare schemes will continue.
Another party functionary credited the BJP’s Ratri Pravas Samvad Abhiyaan for helping them connect with slum dwellers. As part of this initiative, launched in November 2024 under Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva, several party leaders engaged with residents across 250 jhuggi clusters in the city.
“The idea was to not only visit their homes but through that exercise understand their problems and offer an alternative,” said another Delhi BJP leader.
Delhi’s slum dwellers are a critical vote bank eyed by all political parties. According to estimates by parties, around 20 lakh people live in Delhi’s slums.
They were traditionally supporters of the Congress, especially under former chief minister Sheila Dikshit’s tenure, but the AAP managed to win them over during the Assembly elections of 2013 and 2015 through a series of targeted policies, such as mohalla clinics, reduction in power and water bills, and providing basic amenities in slum clusters.
At the same time, while the AAP tried to woo the slum dwellers by announcing a series of welfare initiatives, the BJP, especially through the speeches of PM Modi, stressed on handing over ‘pucca’ houses to slum dwellers to strengthen its political hold.
Delhi BJP SC Morcha president Mohan Lal Gihara told ThePrint that its efforts helped the party in strengthening its position and the voters have responded to it.
“Our focus was on reaching out to jhuggis (slum clusters) and even unauthorised colonies to understand the problems of the people. Many shared that not having their own pucca house was a major issue for them. At the same time, lack of basic amenities in these slums also was a matter of concern, something which we have promised to rectify,” he said.
The BJP managed to win the New Delhi seat for the first time since it came into existence in 2008.
At the parliamentary level, the BJP has been successful in Delhi, winning all seven Lok Sabha seats in 2014, 2019 and 2024. However, Assembly results had been disappointing for it, with the party holding just eight of 70 seats till before the 2025 polls. The AAP had won 62 seats in 2020.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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