AAP insiders analyse Delhi numbers: Ready for re-match

On a day when Delhi was busy speculating whether the national capital will see a President’s rule or there will be some development that will end the stalemate to form a government, the Aam Aadmi Party office in Delhi was vibrant with the presence of hundreds of supporters who were still gloating over the recent success. These supporters seemed least bothered about whether the party would go on to form a government with external support. But beyond the jubilant and the celebrations, the party leadership looked more focused than ever, since it knows that a re-election in next six months is not a far fetched idea anymore. [caption id=“attachment_1277687” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Arvind Kejriwal. AFP[/caption] Even though the party claims that yesterday’s result is a political and moral victory over existing mainstream political parties and more importantly over an age old political system, it is not willing to lose a single moment by indulging into celebration. Rather, it has already started crunching statistics to analyse why the pre-poll opinions that predicted a majority for AAP did not realise into the speculated number of seats. The party claimed that there was a common trend in all their internal poll surveys that gave a hint that BJP might get highest number of seats in the triangular competition. “In our pre-poll surveys we saw that our vote share was coming close to 36% but among these people only 24% said that they expected AAP to win the election,” says a source in the party who wished to remain unnamed. The party predicts that anxiety among voters have caused AAP a few seats. “Our analysis says that if we had got around 3400 more votes across a few constituencies, we could have won a few more seats,” says Prashant Saxena, a member of AAP’s Delhi election coordination committee. According to Yogendra Yadav, a leader of AAP who himself has had a career as a political analyst spanning over more than two decades, says that it was not an uncommon thing for a new party. AAP claims that it has conceded in the Muslim majority constituencies also. According to the party’s internal survey the majority of the Muslim votes has remained with the Congress. “Many among the minority section have thought that voting for AAP might strengthen BJP’s position as they perceived that AAP will cut into the Congress votes,” says the party source. The party, however, claims that its voters are not anti-Congress or anti-BJP, but anti-establishment voters who wants to overrule the age old political system and the way politics is practised in India. The party however has done remarkably well among another sections of marginalised voters. It has won 9 out of 12 constituencies reserved for SC/ST candidates. But according to the party, it could have won a few more seats had it not been for the certain torch symbol on the EVM (electronic voting machine). “The torch button almost looks like the broom (the AAP symbol). We think many people must have confused between the two. Our survey shows that in a few constituencies, where there were candidates under the torch symbol, our margin of loss is almost similar to the votes for those independent candidates. Janakpuri and Kalakji are two such constituencies where it mattered the most,” says one AAP insider who is responsible for analysing the election data. One more concern for the Aam Aadmi Party should be the lack of skilled political workers. The party which is only a year old into the political fray has a bunch of fresh young volunteers who might have united for a cause, but definitely not politically hardened political workers. The party concedes that lack of politically skilled workers have cost them some votes. “These idealistic young volunteers are still not skilled in electoral politics,” says the same source. “Our kids were thinking the revolution is over by afternoon. But for parties like the Congress and BJP the real game of booth management starts only after afternoon,” he says taking a jibe at both the parties alleging that they indulged into dirty games of booth management. But even after all these factors going wrong for the party, AAP has managed to pull off a spectacular result where all it’s big guns managed to win their respective seats, including Kejriwal’s win over Sheila Dikshit with an unthinkable margin of almost 25,000 votes. However, after declaring that it will not seek any support or extend its support to anyone in order to form a government the Aam Aadmi Party now looks beyond the ‘what ifs’ as it guesses that a re-election might be on the cards. “We need not worry about the reelection. It’s a party that got 28 seats from zero. The number of votes will rather increase because the unsure voters will also now come forward to vote for us,” says a party leader. But even as the party might be preparing for a re-election, AAP is now focusing on the 2014 Lok Sabha polls also, claims party insiders. “We have won 28 MLA seats in the Delhi Assembly elections. So there are no second thoughts that the party will field its candidates for all 7 Lok Sabha seats in the upcoming elections,” says the party source. Accepting the fact that a general election after six months will have no similarities with an urban elections like Delhi’s, the party has claimed that it will try to field it’s candidates in almost 309 districts across 22 states in India. “It will be a completely different election in 2014. Local politics, caste equation, political violence, all these factors will have to be kept in mind but at the same time our support base is constantly growing in outer states. This time during elections volunteers came from almost all the states including southern states like Tamil Nadu.” As of now the support base of Arvind kejriwal and his party outside Delhi is still not clear, but AAP might spoil a lot of set equations in the national elections which is a few months away.