Congress was reduced to zero seats in Delhi in the 70-member Assembly and 63 candidates forfeited their security deposits, including senior leaders Ajay Maken, Kiran Walia, Haroon Yusuf and Yoganand Shastri. The party had been in power for 15 uninterrupted years before going out of office just 13 months back.
It was a crushing defeat for the heavyweights of the party like chief ministerial face Ajay Maken, Dr AK Walia, Chaudhary Prem Singh, Sharm-istha Mukherjee, Devender Yadav, Dr Yoganand Shastri, Raj Kumar Chauhan, Haroon Yusuf, Shoaib Iqbal, Jaikishan, Chaudhary Mateen Ahmad and Asif Mohammed Khan. A majority of Congress candidates remained in third place and their margin of defeat was very high.
While they could not win a single seat, candidates from seven constituencies, including Badli, Chandni Chowk, Jangpura, laxmi Nagar and Matia Mahal, managed to save their deposit. The Congress has obtained only 86,692 votes (9.2 per cent of the total polled) in the Assembly polls as compared to 24.05 per cent votes in 2013.
This election has proved to be the waterloo for several politicians of Congress and defeat seems to have ended their political career in Delhi. The margin of defeat of Congress candidates was also high across the city. The Congress rout in Delhi has indicated that its traditional votebank of Muslim, Dalit and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) has shifted to Aam Aadmi Party.
However, no strategy, including Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s roadshows to inject energy into the demoralised party workers and early declaration of the names of its candidates, could work as all its leaders lost badly. AAP also made deep inroads among the minorities, setting alarm bells ringing in Congress. In the last Assembly polls, a large section of the community had remained committed to Congress with the result that five of the eight seats that the party managed to win had a heavy presence of minorities. Also, four of the Congress winners were Muslims.
Ajay Maken, who was the Congress Campaign Committee chief, finished third in Sadar Bazar and forfeited his deposit. Maken has lost to AAP candidate Som Dutt from Sadar Bazar seat by a margin of 51,176 votes. So was the fate of former Delhi Minister Kiran Walia, who contested against Arvind Kejriwal for the New Delhi seat.
Neither did its gamble of fielding President Pranab Mukherjee’s daughter Sharmistha Mukherjee in Greater Kailash pay off for Congress. Mukherjee also lost his deposit. She managed just 6,102 votes. local Congress veterans fell like ninepins with most of them, including some former MPs and MlAs, finishing third.
Former Delhi Assembly Speaker Chaudhary Prem Singh, who tasted defeat in December 2013 Assembly polls after his winning spree that had started way back in 1958, was fighting one more battle for his survival from Ambedkar Nagar (reserved seat) but he lost his deposit. He could manage only 5,336 votes. Former Delhi Minister Raj Kumar Chauhan also lost to AAP candidate Rakhi Birla by a margin of 22,699 votes but he has managed to secure his deposit.
The seats in question — Ballimaran, Okhla, Mustafabad, Seelampur and Chandni Chowk — have all turned away from Congress this time. Veteran Shoaib Iqbal, who had won the last elections on a Janata Dal (United) ticket and joined Congress days before the Delhi polls, also lost. Congress had touted his siding with the party as a major gain, saying it would send a strong signal to minorities.
The prominent losers included Congress Power Minister and five-time sitting MlA Haroon Yusuf, who was the Congress legislature Party leader in Delhi. Apart from Yusuf, other Congress MlAs like Hasan Ahmed, Asif Mohammed Khan and Chaudhary Mateen Ahmad, too, lost.
Sitting MlAs Devender Yadav, Jaikishan and Prahlad Singh Sawhney, too, lost while sitting MlA and DPCC chief Arvinder Singh lovely had opted out of the contest and decided to work for the party instead. A number of party candidates who had come second in the last Assembly election were this time re-nominated in the hope that the party could benefit from their established standing, but to no avail.