The results of the recent Delhi Assembly elections raise a new set of questions regarding India's changing electoral dynamics. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has seemingly become the victim of the same phenomenon that Congress fell to during the general elections in 2014 – higher and growing aspirations and expectations of the electorate. While aspirations were raised with the language of development used by Congress, these came to be appropriated by Narendra Modi and the BJP. Now it looks like the hype around the so-called 'Gujarat model' has caught up with Modi and his party as people sought change and wanted to see if the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) can do something more substantial than what BJP has demonstrated since coming to power.
In this moment of a new kind of conformist optimism, the electorate appears willing to play by the rules, but is stretching its expectations in order to put pressure on the parties to initially promise wonders and then punish them for not delivering on them once in power. In this play, the BJP failed to come up with anything dramatic that could capture the imagination of the electorate. Instead, it looked like a party that was playing a rather old tune that has long been unable to keep pace with the Indian voter.
The game of speaking the language of development and governance on the one hand, and actively polarising the electorate along religious lines on the other – as witnessed during the riots in east Delhi's Trilokpuri area and premeditated attacks on churches – has become rather too overtly contradictory. Delhi is a city-state of settlers who have come essentially in search of livelihood and not out of some innate sense of belonging to the place or its culture. To sustain polarisation between communities, it is essential for locals to feel threatened by either the loss of culture or livelihood. Neither is the case in Delhi. Further, Delhi has remained a city free of communal carnage for more than two decades under the previous Congress government, and even during the BJP rule that had followed the 'soft model' of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Sudden occurrences of communal violence were too blatant to be believed and felt too unwarranted for people to be persuaded by the logic of their necessity. Additionally, Modi, who in his heydays of campaigning was boisterously critical of Manmohan Singh for his silence on key issues, appeared stoic to the electorate.
