After facing disappointments and drubbing in back-to-back Assembly polls in Punjab, Goa, Delhi civic polls and Rajouri Garden bypolls recently, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo Arvind Kejriwal helped the party break the jinx and regained his party's glory by making a comeback in the Bawana bypolls on Monday.
Of the total 1,31,950 votes polled, the AAP cornered 59,886 (45.4 per cent), the BJP 35,834 (27.2) and the Congress 31,919 (24.2 per cent). As many as 1,413 votes were polled under the 'none of the above' (NOTA) category.
AAP's thumping victory in Bawana bypoll has scripted a comeback after electoral disappointments. "This victory means a lot to the party as it has once again proved that the core vote bank of the AAP is intact. This victory has also silenced the Doubting Thomas's", said an AAP leader.
The Kejriwal-led party altered its game plan, as a part of which the CM muted himself, refraining from targeting political rivals, including PM Narendra Modi, and instead, focussing on the achievements of his own Government during the campaign.
Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and labour Minister Gopal Rai, who has been heading the party's Delhi unit since the recent MCD poll debacle, attributed the success to the AAP's track record in governance. In a one-line tweet, Kejriwal echoed the same. "I thank the people of Bawana for putting their seal of approval on AAP's clean politics and work done over the last 2.5 years," he wrote on Twitter.
Sources in the AAP believe that by remaining quiet and concentrating on the achievements and pro-people policies of his Government, Kejriwal helped the party in winning this election.
"It surely has paid off. Over time, a perception had developed that the AAP and Kejriwal could not go beyond petty bickering, no matter how hard the Government worked. As per the new strategy, the focus is on what we have delivered. We shaped the agenda, instead of being reactive," an AAP leader said.
A close aide of the Chief Minister, however, said Kejriwal's silence did play a role, but this alone could not have scripted the success story in a rural constituency like Bawana, where a multitude of factors determined a candidate's winning potential.
The North-West Delhi constituency of 3.5 lakh voters is dotted with slum clusters, the biggest of which is the Shahbad Dairy. The vote-counting trends indicated that the AAP gained majorly from these areas. The votes of the rural areas of the constituency were counted in the first few rounds, after which the Congress had a clear edge over its two rivals — the AAP and the BJP. But, as the votes polled in the booths of the slum clusters started coming into the picture, the AAP widened its margin.
The AAP Government's initiatives like slashing the power tariff by half, providing free water up to a certain limit, laying of sewer lines and reforms in the health and education sectors have always been a major hit in the JJ clusters, where the residents are mostly migrants from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.