Several Aam Aadmi parties (AAPs) starting with Arvind Kejriwal have lost Delhi parliamentary elections with a margin smaller than the votes they have won in the parliament.
If Kejwal loses from New Delhi, Manish Sisodia will be defeated from Jumpura, Saurab Bharadwaj from Greater Kailash, Somnath Balati from Malviya Nagar, Durgesh Patak from Rajinda Nagar, and Congress in all seats They lost where they got more votes than the BJP won. It affects the outcome. Overall, there were 13 of the 70 seats.
BJP’s Parvesh Verma defeated Kejriwal, with the AAP Chief winning three times since 2013 with 4,089 votes. Congress candidate Sandeep Dikshit came in third place with 4,568 votes in the New Delhi seat. In 2013, Kejriwal defeated Dikshit’s mother Sheila Dikshit and ended his reign as a commercial.
BJP candidate Parvesh Verma greets his supporters after winning the election from New Delhi constituency. (Express photo by Parveen Khanna)
Verma, a two-time MP who had been short for MLA after winning a Mehrauli seat in 2013, is also the son of former Delhi CM, the late BJP Sahib Singh Verma.
At Jangpura, former deputy CM Sisodia was defeated by BJP’s Tarvinder Singh Marwah with just 675 votes. Congressional candidate here, Farhad Suri, won 7,350 votes. Sisodia, the three-time MLA of Patparganj, was protected by an AAP from Jangpura as Patparganj was considered a difficult constituency of the AAP.
In Greater Kailash, AAP’s Bharadwaj was defeated by Shikha Roy, BJP’s Shikha Roy with 3,188 votes. Here, Congressional candidate Garvit Singhvi won 6,711 votes. A three-time MLA, Bharadwaj, was a Cabinet Minister with a portfolio of household, health, power and urban development under Kejwal, and was widely expected to win.
In Malviya Nagar, another popular AAP candidate, Somnath Bharti, lost to former councillor Satish Upadhyay by 2,131 votes. Congressional candidate Jitender Kumar Kochar won 6,770 votes.
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Bharti, a lawyer for the Supreme Court and Delhi High Court, has been sitting in MLA at Malviya Nagar since 2013.
Vice-chairman Rakhi Birla was another prominent AAP leader who lost after winning more votes than the margins Congress won. Birla, a three-time Mangolpuri MLA, was sent from Madipur, which was saved in SC. She lost to BJP’s Kailash Gangwal with 10,899 votes, and Congressional candidate JP Panwar won 17,958 votes.
In Rajinder Nagar, Durgesh Pathak was defeated by BJP’s Umang Bajaj with 1,231 votes. Congressional candidate Vineet Yadav won 4,015 votes here. Pathak, a member of the AAP’s Political Affairs Committee, first won a seat at Bypoll in 2022.
AAP Sangam Vihar Mla Dinesh Mohaniya lost to BJP’s Chandan Kumar Choudhary with just 344 votes amid the lowest margin. Congress’s tough Choudhary won 15,863 votes. Three times MLA Mohaniya was jailed in 2016 for sexual harassment cases, but was later acquitted.
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Another seat where AAP candidates were defeated in a similar manner were Badli, Chhatarpur, Mehrauli, Nangloi Jat, Timarpur and Trilokpuri.
The results are set to exacerbate hand squeezing within India bloc as Trinamoll Congress and Samajwadi Party campaigned for AAP candidates to support an alliance between the AAP and Congress. Congress may have ruined AAP’s chances with at least 13 seats on the paper, but it has failed to win one seat for the third consecutive time, bringing a slight rise in overall vote share since 2020 .
