Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Wednesday said that the SAD’s performance in the just-concluded Delhi Assembly elections had “shown improvement” over the previous elections, in terms of both vote-share and the number of votes polled to the party’s candidates. At the same time, he said that the party high command would soon meet “to study the details and meaning of the verdict and consider ways to further improving the party’s bonds with the people”.
“The sole reason for this increase not being converted into seats is the transfer of all Congress votes to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), disturbing poll arithmetic in other constituencies, including those contested by the SAD, and giving AAP a huge jump at the expense of the Congress,” said Badal, who is also SAD patron.
Badal said that so complete was the Congress surrender to the AAP that more than 60 Congress candidates lost their security deposits, clearly proving an en masse shift of Congress votes to AAP. “The AAP is a beneficiary of the decimation of the Congress party rather than the comparative showing of the BJP and the SAD, both of which had recorded increase in vote share. This is the one lesson that must not be lost of in arriving at any conclusions on the Delhi poll results,” he said.
Badal, however, said that he and SAD were grateful to Delhi’s voters that “even in this wave, SAD’s core vote bank has stayed intact and has actually registered an improvement over our showing in the last elections, though for reasons of demographic arithmetics, this is not reflected in the number of seats won”. likewise, BJP’s overall vote share has also marginally increased from 33 per cent to 34 per cent, he pointed.