New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) might have lost power in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) but it may see a silver lining in this defeat — if assembly elections were held in Delhi today and voters exercise their franchise the same way, the BJP party would end up with 24 seats in the 70-member Delhi Assembly, 16 more than its 2020 tally.
On the other hand, the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) would get 41 seats, 21 less than what it got in 2020.
ThePrint arrived at these figures by extrapolating the ward-wise votes in every assembly segment. However, such extrapolations don’t necessarily paint an accurate picture, given that voting patterns and voters’ concerns are different in municipal, assembly and parliamentary elections.
The MCD polls saw a voter turnout of 50.48 per cent — down from 53.6 per cent in 2017 — while in the 2020 assembly elections, voter turnout was as high as 62.59 per cent.
“MCD elections are peculiar in the sense that they are closest to the concept of direct democracy. The voters know their candidates and their pros and cons. Even in Sheila (Dixit) ji’s time in Delhi, the BJP was in power in the MCD because it had better grassroots connect. So voters know how to differentiate,” political analyst Rasheed Kidwai explained.
One must also note that Delhi Cantt and New Delhi fall under the Cantonment Board and New Delhi Municipal Corporation and therefore, around 2.76 lakh voters in these areas aren’t part of the MCD electorate.
Extrapolating voting patterns of the MCD elections, one can assess that the BJP would defeat the AAP in Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia’s Patparganj seat and in AAP leader Atishi’s Kalkaji seat if assembly polls were held today.
In the MCD elections, the BJP got 44,998 votes and the AAP 43,686 votes in the three wards under Kalkaji. All of these three wards were won by the BJP in the 2022 Delhi civic polls.
Similarly, in Patparganj, the BJP got 35,048 votes in all four wards, while the AAP got 32,148 votes.
Going by the extrapolated data, Bawana, Shalimar Bagh, Tri Nagar, Shakur Basti, Model Town, Sadar Bazar, Palam, Jangpura, Kasturba Nagar, Shahdara are some of the assembly seats that would go to the BJP.
The maximum vote difference, as extrapolated, was in Northeast Delhi’s Rohtas Nagar constituency. The seat consists of four wards: Ashok Nagar, Ram Nagar East, Rohtash Nagar and Welcome Colony. In the 2017 polls, the BJP won three wards and got 55,855 votes in all four wards, while the AAP got 41,354 votes — a difference of 14,501 votes.
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Surge in vote share for AAP, BJP
For the MCD elections, over 1.45 crore voters are registered in all 250 wards.
The AAP won the MCD polls with 134 wards, while BJP — which ruled the civic body for over 15 years — was a close second with 104 wards. And while the AAP saw its vote share surge to 42.05 per cent from 21.09 per cent in 2017, the BJP too — though it lost 77 wards compared to 2017 — registered a rise of over 3 per cent in its 2017 vote share of 36.08 per cent.
This was the first MCD election held after a delimitation exercise in the wake of the merger of three municipal corporations — north, south and east Delhi — which reduced the number of wards from 272 to 250.
After the new delimitation exercise, each assembly constituency in Delhi was left with 3-6 wards depending on population.
BJP’s Impreet Bakshi said her party’s increased vote share in the MCD polls is proof that the AAP will be “swept away” in the next assembly election. “In the 2025 assembly (polls), BJP’s vote share will reach 50 per cent. Even after 15 years of anti-incumbency, BJP voters have not left the party and our vote share has only increased. We lost more than 16 seats just by a meagre difference of 1,000 votes,” Bakshi told ThePrint.
Meanwhile, Kirari MLA and AAP spokesperson Rituraj Jha said it is not fair to compare the MCD polls with assembly or Lok Sabha elections.
“This is a three-tier governance system where Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections are the presidential elections, where Modi vs who is decided. In local municipal elections, different candidates have their own effect in small pockets. Best comparison would be to compare the MCD election of 2017, and AAP’s seats have seen 300 per cent growth,” said Jha.
According to Kidwai, Indian voters are politically astute and exercise their voting choices differently in different elections. “If you look at Muslim voters from Delhi, they voted for Congress in 2014 election, but they voted for the AAP in the 2015 assembly election. Similarly, in Delhi itself, (all) seven Lok Sabha seats went to the BJP in 2019, but in the assembly election just next year, the BJP won just 8 seats out of 70.”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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