The Bankruptcy of the Rahul Congress

To revel in the AAP's defeat is like taking pleasure over Modi's advent

- HARTOSH SINGH BAL

As the results of the Delhi election began to come in, two things became clear. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s dedication to organisation and detail in its campaign, well documented in a recent piece in The Caravan, had prevailed. But the Aam Aadmi Party was not a spent force. It had fought a close battle, exceeding the vote share predictions of even the more optimistic opinion polls. Yet, strangely, the party that seemed happiest with the results was the Congress, which won no seats, as well as the coterie of upper-caste liberals—mostly Hindu, some Muslim—who effectively run the party’s organisational machinery from Delhi’s drawing rooms.

The Congress had done enough to ensure the AAP’s defeat. Many of its candidates had acted as spoilers, such as Sandeep Dikshit, whose third-place finish resulted in Arvind Kejriwal’s defeat in the New Delhi constituency. But the very fact that the party saw this as an achievement sums up its state—here was a national party celebrating an act that directly benefitted its main political opponent, the BJP.

It is not as if the AAP government or the party was without its problems. The charge against the AAP is twofold. The first is detailed in another piece in this issue of