Agency :
In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls – the biggest carnival of democracy in the world – while the BJP, riding on the back of the Narendra Modi wave, emerged as a clear winner and the ruling Congress was thrown out of power, it was Arvind Kejriwal’s one-year-old Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which was the biggest loser of all.
As predicted by the exit polls, AAP, which had contested on some 440 seats, fared poorly and clearly failed to impress the voters of the country. The rookie party, which had been boasting to win over a 100 seats since the beginning of the crucial General Elections could win only four seats, and that too, outside Delhi, where it had stunned the political pundits by wining 28 out of the total 70 assembly seats last year and ended the 15 years of uninterrupted rule of the Congress party.
The party drew a complete blank in Delhi – considered to be its strongest fort but surprisingly won some ground in Punjab. AAP’s unexpected success in Punjab could help the party in the upcoming Haryana and Maharashtra assembly polls.
While many AAP candidates – including better known faces Shazia Ilmi (Ghaziabad) – lost their security deposit, the party fared badly in Maharashtra too. Exit polls had predicted at least one seat for the AAP from Maharashtra. But none of its candidates finished even second in the six Lok Sabha seats in Mumbai where there were high hopes on Medha Patkar and Mayank Gandhi. Bangalore turned out to be another disappointment for the AAP. The party had hoped to make a mark in Karnataka.
One year back, AAP, which was an offshoot of Anna Hazare’s Jan Lokpal movement, made a spectacular political debut by defeating Congress in Delhi, its chief Arvind Kejriwal too defeated Sheila Dikshit, the three-time Chief Minister, and since then it received enormous public support and its strength grew by leaps and bounds.
Taking outside support of the Congress, which it attacked and tagged as the “most corrupt”, AAP formed the government and Kejriwal became the Chief Minister. In the beginning of its 49-day rule in Delhi, the AAP govt took some very bold decisions, which further added people’s support to the party at the ground level, but in its over-enthusiasm and due to political immaturity, the party took some very faulty decisions and got mired in controversies.
Several AAP leaders made headlines for falling on the other side of the law and Kejriwal, then a favourite politician in the national media, kept ignoring them.
