Delhi elections 2015: Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP breaks rules of identity politics, dents core vote bases of BJP & Congress

By Sanjay Kumar, Shreyas Sardesai & Pranav Gupta

NEW DELHI: The arrival of the Aam Aadmi Party on Delhi’s electoral scene in 2013 upset the traditional support base of various parties across various castes and communities.

The usual pattern of upper castes voting mainly for the BJP and the OBCs and Dalits voting largely for the Congress stood disrupted.

The AAP broke the rules of identity politics and made a dent in the core vote bases of both the established political players.

Findings from surveys conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi estimate an average of 40% of the voters in Delhi belong to the upper castes. About 12% are Brahmins, 7% are Punjabi Khatris, 7% are Rajputs, 6% belong to the Vaishya (Bania) and Jain communities and 8% are from other upper castes (See Table 1).

Traditionally, the upper castes of Delhi had voted for the BJP in sizeable numbers, particularly the Punjabi Khatri and the Bania communities.

Support for the BJP among these two communities was consistently above the 50% mark in the 1998, 2003 and 2008 Vidhan Sabha elections.

However in 2013, the AAP succeeded in taking away a big chunk of the BJP’s Punjabi Khatri and Bania votes. Among the Punjabi Khatris, it garnered 39% of the votes compared with the BJP’s 36%, while among the Jains and Banias (the community to which Arvind Kejriwal of the AAP belongs), the party ended up with 29% of the vote and gave the BJP a decent fight.

An analysis of the 2013 assembly election results confirms the damage done by the AAP to the BJP’s core Punjabi-Bania base. Out of the 16 assembly seats that are Punjabi-dominated, the AAP won as many as nine and the BJP six (See Table 2).

During the 2014 Lok Sabha election, the AAP lost a substantial chunk of its Punjabi vote to the BJP and if the party wants to do well again, winning back this vote is absolutely critical. With Kiran Bedi (who is a Punjabi) being made the chief ministerial candidate of the BJP, the task has been made more difficult for the AAP.

The two other prominent upper castes, the Brahmins and the Rajputs, also showed an inclination towards the AAP in 2013, breaking their pattern of voting for the BJP and the Congress more or less equally.

The BJP was, however, more successful in retaining support among the Jat community, roughly 5% of Delhi’s population and located mostly in the rural parts of outer Delhi. Whatever Jat votes the AAP secured in 2013 came not from the BJP but from the Jats who voted for the Congress in 2008.

The Jats of Delhi, many of whom had shifted allegiance to the Congress in 2003, returned to the BJP in 2008 and continued to be with the party in 2013. In 2013, the party made special efforts to enthuse the community by giving tickets to Parvesh Verma and Azad Singh, son and brother of Jat leader and former CM late Sahib Singh Verma.

The polarisation that took place following the Jat-Muslim riots in Muzaffarnagar in September 2013 would have also led to this. The Jats stuck with the BJP and the Muslims with the Congress. In 2015, both the Congress and the AAP are actively trying to woo the Jat vote by aggressively pitching the Modi government’s ordinance to amend the Land Acquisition Act as anti-farmer.

In this context, it would be interesting to see if the BJP is able to hold on to its Jat vote in the coming election. There are at least 11 seats where Jats hold sway and of these, the BJP had won eight in the 2013 assembly election.

OBC communities such as the Gujjars, Yadavs and the lower OBCs together form about 18% of Delhi’s population. Traditionally the backbone of the Congress’s base (along with Muslims and Dalits) in Delhi, they switched over to the AAP in 2013 in large numbers. Even in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, these were the only communities, apart from the Dalits and Muslims, among whom the AAP continued to do well despite the so called “Modi wave.”

The Dalit communities (17% of Delhi’s population), in fact, have been instrumental in AAP’s spectacular rise in the city. Having mainly been with the Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party in the past, they shifted in massive numbers towards the AAP in 2013, especially the Balmiki community, (See Table 3), so much so that the AAP emerged as the leading choice of Dalits.

About 36% of the Dalits voted for the AAP in the 2013 election as opposed to 29% for the BJP and 23% for the Congress. This sizeable support among Dalits for the AAP resulted in the party winning as many as nine of the 12 seats reserved for Scheduled Castes in the 2013 Assembly elections (See Table 4).

Retaining this Dalit support in the face of the BJP’s aggressive efforts to woo the community will be a major challenge for the AAP. The induction of Krishna Tirath and Buta Singh’s son Arvinder Singh Lovely are part of the BJP’s strategy to get Dalits on its side.

The fault lines of class may eventually prove to be a bigger factor in determining voter preferences in Delhi’s elections than the divisions of caste and community.

The fact that only a Jat is fielded as a candidate from a predominantly Jat area, that Kejriwal chose to describe himself as a Bania at a traders’ gathering, that multiple Dalit meetings have been organised by BJP President Amit Shah and party MP Udit Raj, and that Narendra Modi’s first rally in Delhi was attended by BJP chief ministers from Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, indicate that political parties continue to see caste and regional identities as important factors in Delhi’s electoral politics.