The BJP’s failure to fix its weak link of losing elections by a narrow margin proved costly for the party. The BJP lost four of its strongholds — Delhi Cantonment, Karol Bagh, Rohini and Tilak Nagar — to the Aam Aadmi Party by a margin of 2,000 votes or less.
In all, the AAP conquered eight pocket buroughs of the BJP that essentially prevented the latter from getting the magic figure of 36 in the Delhi Assembly. In the 2008 Assembly polls, the BJP had lost 21 seats to the Congress with the victory margin of less than 5,000 votes. In eight of these seats, the margin was even less than 1,000 votes. In run-up to the Assembly polls, the BJP had focussed on these constituencies to strengthen its poll prospects.
The BJP lost the Assembly constituencies of Delhi Cantonment, Tilak Nagar, Shalimar Bagh, Rohini, Mundka, Karol Bagh, Hari Nagar and Greater Kailash. However, the narrowest margin of BJP’s defeat came out in Delhi Cantt which it lost by 355 votes. Similarly, the BJP forfeited the Karol Bagh, Rohini and Tilak Nagar seats by 1,750, 1,872 and 2,088 votes respectively.
The poll results in these constituencies were the most surprising as six of these seats were represented by the BJP. The BJP’s SP Ratawal from Karol Bagh, who had won the seat for four times, while the BJP lost the Hari Nagar seat, which it had given to SAD after its full-time MlA HS Balli quit the party, to contest on the Congress ticket. The SAD’s Sl Sharma lost the seat to AAP’s Jagdeep Singh by a margin of 8,876 votes.
The Delhi Cantonment seat was also represented by BJP’s Karan Singh Tanwar for three terms. The BJP’s Jai Bhagwan Agarwal and Ravinder Bansal too had been winning their Rohini and Shalimar Bagh constituencies three times on the trot. The other two strongholds that BJP surrendered to the debutant AAP include Greater Kailash and Mundka.
The BJP’s defeat in Shalimar Bagh and Mundka assume greater significance as the former had been the constituency of former Chief Minister Sahib Singh Verma while the latter was his native place. This time, Verma’s brother and Mayor of North Delhi, Azad Singh was contesting on the BJP ticket from Mundka but was defeated by a substantial margin of 7,134 votes. Similarly, the BJP lost its Greater Kailash seat by a margin of 13,092 votes. Here BJP veteran VK Malhotra’s son Ajay Kumar Malhotra lost to AAP’s Saurabh Bhardwaj.