On the morning of the Delhi elections 2025 results, I was on a debate show with senior journalist Prannoy Roy and his colleagues on his YouTube platform, DeKoder. AAP was trailing the BJP, and the panellists were analysing what the party had done wrong to be losing in its bastion. When my turn came, I asked Roy, “When you lost NDTV, could it be attributed to anything you did wrong? I don’t think so. We are living in a time where an authoritarian regime can go to any lengths to seize control. If we want to be honest about it, then we must be able to say that clearly.”
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has made several mistakes, both as a political party and in running the administration in Delhi and Punjab. But can its defeat in the 2025 Delhi Assembly elections be attributed to any one of those mistakes? Most certainly not.
Delhi’s voters do not dislike Arvind Kejriwal. In fact, even in defeat, AAP secured approximately 44 per cent of the vote, compared to 54 per cent in 2020. Over the last five years, the BJP convinced 10 per cent of Delhi voters—perhaps not inaccurately—that AAP was a false choice or no choice at all. A gun was held to the heads of Delhi’s people: if you do not vote for the BJP, your city government will remain dysfunctional, and your beloved city will decline. It is unthinkable that a Prime Minister would be so cruel and self-serving as to hold his own capital city to ransom the way Narendra Modi has—but that is exactly what happened in Delhi.
After Arvind Kejriwal won a second consecutive landslide in 2020—on the back of his government’s stellar performance in public education and healthcare, free power and water, and bus rides for women—the BJP knew it could not defeat him in a democratic contest. So it came up with a three-step game plan: Disempower the elected government, dismember the political leadership, and destroy Delhi.
Also read: Delhi poll result isn’t just Brand Kejriwal losing sheen. BJP stepping out of Modi shadow too
Disempowering the government of Delhi
How was Sheila Dikshit able to govern Delhi without significant run-ins with the central government? The answer is obvious to anyone willing to look. Between the 2020 and 2025 elections, the Centre amended the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD) Act, formally redefining “government” in Delhi as the “Lieutenant Governor”—a political appointee of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). Previously, the Delhi government needed the L-G’s approvals only for major policy decisions, while day-to-day matters remained under the elected government’s control. The amendment, however, effectively transferred all decision-making powers to the central government, making the BJP the de facto ruler of Delhi.
Soon after, the MHA appointed Vinai Kumar Saxena, a Gujarat BJP politician, as L-G. He wasted no time in ordering investigations into countless AAP government programmes, using them as pretexts to either shut them down or delay their implementation. For instance, an alleged scam in Mohalla Clinic medicine procurement meant that Delhi’s health department stopped paying for medicines for the clinics altogether.
When AAP won a brief victory in the Supreme Court, which ruled that control over Delhi’s bureaucracy rested with the elected government, the Centre snatched it away from AAP through an ordinance within a week. None of this should be permitted under the Constitution of India—in fact, the Supreme Court has yet to even hear the case on the ordinance’s constitutional validity, but the rule of law is no longer something we seem to care about as a society—so I will let that slide for now.
On the surface, Delhi had an AAP government. But the chief minister had no independent decision-making authority, no control over his staff, yet was still held accountable for the government’s performance. Adding insult to injury, he was not even allowed to complain about this situation, lest people get too annoyed by becoming aware of their own disenfranchisement.
To the BJP’s dismay, this still wasn’t enough to stop the people of Delhi from trusting AAP. In 2022, they voted the party into power at the municipal level as well. But the BJP was a step ahead. Sensing its impending defeat, it amended the MCD Act just before the elections, placing the municipal corporation under the L-G’s control—similar to the GNCTD amendment. Delhi voters might as well have voted for Donald Trump’s Republican Party, because their votes no longer determined who governed them.
The city’s governance endured a death by a thousand cuts. Work still got done, but only through personal relationships with bureaucrats, pleading with the L-G, public battles with the Centre, and the goodwill of the certain officials. This, however, is no way for a serious country’s capital to function.
Dismembering the AAP leadership
Arvind Kejriwal built his brand as a clean politician, proudly calling himself kattar imaandaar, much to the BJP’s annoyance. Over the last five years, half of Kejriwal’s cabinet has spent time in prison. Not a single trial has even begun, let alone resulted in a conviction. Yet, our legal system allowed the elected government of Delhi to be incarcerated and systematically dismantled.
This fuelled a media frenzy over alleged corruption scandals, amplified by the spectacle of AAP ministers being paraded in and out of jail. How is a government supposed to function with a constant target on its back—with one foot inside prison and the other out?
Destroying Delhi
The BJP’s systematic disempowerment of AAP and the literal removal of its political leadership had severe consequences for Delhi’s people. The city fell into a state of disrepair: sewers choked and overflowed, roads crumbled, water pipelines leaked, and garbage piled up in colonies.
Delhi’s citizens were subjected to deliberate suffering and cruelty as punishment for their political choice. By the time the Delhi elections 2025 arrived, one section of the city—those who did not rely on Kejriwal’s free education, healthcare, power, water, and transport—yearned for more visible signs of a functioning government. The ransom was finally paid to the BJP in the form of votes.
A crisis misdiagnosed
Is this an oversimplification of what happened in Delhi? Yes. I have only scratched the surface of how the BJP hounded AAP out of power. I have not listed AAP’s own mistakes because enough has already been written about them—one can believe or dismiss those critiques as they choose. But without the BJP’s power grab, none of AAP’s shortcomings would have cost it its majority in Delhi elections 2025.
Our democracy is hanging by a thread. What the BJP has done to Delhi, it can and will do to other states. Misdiagnosing this crisis will prove fatal to our democracy.
The author is an AAP spokesperson and a public policy graduate from Harvard University. He tweets @AkshayMarathe. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
I hope you had more depth in your analysis. How much of these 44% belong to the Muslim and reserved constituencies? Is the free handouts at the expense of civic services to the middle class a right way to govern? Denying 70+ year free health insurance the right policy choice? Does AAP deserve another chance when it failed to deliver on clean water, clean Yamuna, and clean air. Look at the roads when you drive in from the Tikri Border
@AkshayMarathe I found has got backbone Lah. Otherwise Indian Journalists have hijacked their sense or sold out to…….. Even exxex workers are honest.
Highly biased and one sided views . I think journalists think we have no mind and understanding. We as voters are fool
Yet another free online toilet site feeding on urban naxal agenda….. This article wasted my life’s precious 4 minutes exactly the way kejriwal wasted my Delhi’s precious 10 years.
Very good analysis. Few things that I don’t understand are – how a government in India can provide lot of freebies when the income is not matching with expenses? Why should a government give freebies? Welfare schemes targeting only poors are needed to have long term return. But, “welfare” schemes benefitting both rich & poor will harm the society.
Very Good Analysis. AAP didn’t do anything wrong, what BJP did was wrong to win elections.
What an article. People who have not gone to school would have presented better. Many incumbent governments in India, at state and center have lost due to anti-incumbency
If this is not acknowledged and the party who lost power keeps blaming others, then they will deteriorate and degenerate to have Zero seats in three elections. Wake up and try to write some mature articles.
Keep blaming everyone but don’t do an honest introspection, that’s typical of AAPTards. They have been selling snake oil from day one but it is only now that people have realized it. Self righteousness of AAPTards is nothing but nauseating.