New Delhi, Feb 8 (UNI) After a long wait of 27 years, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) today returned to power in Delhi with a two-thirds majority to end the 10-year rule of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
By winning 48 seats in the 70-member Assembly, which had gone to the hustings on February 5, the BJP got two-thirds majority for the first time in 31 years. Earlier, it had got 49 seats in the November, 1993, Assembly polls.
The AAP, which had stormed to power in 2013 as a new entrant in politics, managed to win only 22 seats this time against 62 it had in the outgoing Assembly.
Its performance was so bad that even its Founder-National Convenor and former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal lost from the prestigious New Delhi constituency from where he had been elected thrice consecutively earlier.
The Congress was yet again completely routed, failing to open its account for the third time in a row in the Delhi Assembly. Most of its candidates lost their security deposit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had led the BJP's campaign, hailed the party's landslide victory saying "Development wins and good governance triumphs".
He emphasised, "We will leave no stone unturned for the all-round development of Delhi".
On the other hand, Kejriwal in a video message conceded defeat and vowed to play the role of a constructive opposition.
The former Chief Minister said, "I humbly accept the mandate of the people and also congratulate the BJP for their victory. I hope the BJP will fulfill all the promises they have made for which the people of Delhi have voted them".
Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha and former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi said, the party would continue to fight against pollution, inflation and corruption.
Accepting the mandate, Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said people voted for change in the Delhi Assembly polls and conceded that "we have to work harder and be responsive to people's issues".
The BJP previously won the Delhi Assembly polls in 1993 but lost power to the Congress in 1998, and since then it has been in the opposition in the prestigious Union Territory, which is the heart of National Capital Region.
In the day's vote count, BJP's Parvesh Verma turned out to be the giant slayer by defeating former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal by a margin of over 4,000 votes from the New Delhi Assembly constituency.
Among other AAP bigshots, former Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia lost to Tarvinder Singh Marwah of the BJP by a margin of over 600 votes, while incumbent Minister Saurabh Bharadwaj was humbled by BJP's
Shikha Roy with a 3188-vote margin.
The silver lining for AAP was the victories of Delhi Chief Minister Atishi and Minister Gopal Rai.
After a snake and ladder game in Kalkaji, Atishi defeated her nearest rival BJP's Ramesh Bidhuri with a margin of 3521 and Gopal Rai won the Babarpur seat by almost 19000 votes.
Prominent BJP candidates who won their seats included Kapil Mishra from Karawal Nagar, Manjinder Singh Sirsa from Rajouri Garden, Mohan Singh Bisht from Mustafabad.
Kailash Gahlot, who joined BJP from AAP ahead of the election, won the Bijwasan seat, while Satish Upadhyay won from Malviya Nagar by upsetting another prominent AAP leader and former Delhi Minister Somnath Bharti.
Other notable BJP victors were Raj Kumar Chauhan from Mangol Puri, Vijender Gupta from Rohini, Karnail Singh from Shakur Basti, Ravinder Singh Negi from Patparganj and former Congressman Arvinder Singh Lovely from Gandhi Nagar.
The AAP had created a sensation by coming to power in Delhi for 49 days with outside support of the Congress in 2013 only a year after the party was founded. It had been ruling the Union Territory at a stretch since 2015.
With regards to vote share, BJP got 45.56 percent votes while AAP secured 43.57 vote share, and the Congress could garner only 6.34 percent of the popular mandae.
In the 2020 elections, the AAP had retained power by winning 62 seats, while the BJP got the remaining eight.
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