That the Aam Admi Party’s (AAP) electoral success before 2025 was always disproportionately larger than its ideological core was a fact well established by election statistics. AAP’s assembly election vote share was always significantly larger than its performance in national elections, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being the primary beneficiary at the AAP’s cost in the latter. The 2025 assembly election results saw an end to this split ticket voting pattern in favour of the AAP and led to a comprehensive BJP victory. What exactly led to this result? HT’s analysis of electoral data — where we classified constituencies by class — shows that AAP mostly lost its support among the not-so-poor voters. Was this all that explains the recent political change in Delhi?

That the Aam Admi Party’s (AAP) electoral success before 2025 was always disproportionately larger than its ideological core was a fact well established by election statistics. AAP’s assembly election vote share was always significantly larger than its performance in national elections, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being the primary beneficiary at the AAP’s cost in the latter. The 2025 assembly election results saw an end to this split ticket voting pattern in favour of the AAP and led to a comprehensive BJP victory. What exactly led to this result? HT’s analysis of electoral data — where we classified constituencies by class — shows that AAP mostly lost its support among the not-so-poor voters. Was this all that explains the recent political change in Delhi?

Latest budget numbers for the government of Delhi raise another interesting question vis-à-vis this issue. According to the Delhi Budget which was presented on March 25, the outgoing AAP government ended up in the worst possible fiscal situation a government can have in an election year. It underspent its budgeted total expenditure target of ₹76,000 crore by ₹6,500 crore despite getting ₹450 crore extra in own tax revenues over the budgeted number of ₹58,750 crore.

Did its inability to spend what it intended to hurt its electoral prospects? It is an interesting counterfactual to pose but difficult to answer. What is easier to answer is the question about what could have led to the AAP government not being able to meet its spending targets. Two of the biggest AAP leaders, Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, spent a lot of their time in jail in 2024. Even after they were given bail, they did not become a part of the government and put their eggs in the campaign rather than the governance basket. The government, meanwhile, became more and more bogged down in a feud with the Lieutenant Governor, the central government’s nominee, who thanks to Delhi not being a full-fledged state enjoys much more executive power than governors in other states. Did the AAP get blindsided to the potential damage this tug-of-war was doing to its governance and politics?

These questions are not of importance and significance just from a historical interest perspective about a political party losing power in a Union Territory. There are at least three issues here which merit a larger extrapolation in India’s current day polity.

First and foremost is the issue of what can be described as an issue of lack of constitutional morality in the central government’s conduct. The BJP government brought a law and got it passed from the parliament to usurp significant powers from the (AAP) government of Delhi after the latter won a prolonged battle in the Supreme Court. Did this turning of tables put a significant squeeze on the governing abilities of the AAP government? It’s is difficult to argue that it would not have. Even in states where state governments still have justified executive control, governors have made it a habit to delay signing bills. Is this not a perversion of federalism and democracy itself in the country?

The second is a more vexed issue vis-à-vis fiscal federalism. A lot of central government funding to states is now from the centrally sponsored scheme (CSS) route. While this trend started before Narendra Modi came to power, it has continued to gain momentum, not just in terms of funds but also its political weaponization. More and more CSS money now comes with strict conditionalities not just in terms of scheme design but also political attribution in favour of the Prime Minister. Where does this leave state governments which are ruled by parties opposed to the BJP? Many of them have held back on implementing these schemes, thereby either losing money from the Centre or taking additional fiscal commitments. Tamil Nadu announcing that it will not take central funds for school education to protest against the three-language formula is the latest example.

The third question follows from the first two. The Centre squeezing states is not something which is happening for the first time in the country. Things were not very different when the Congress enjoyed political dominance at the national level and harassed governments ruled by its opponents in states. In fact, on things such as dismissal of state governments, things are not as bad today as they were earlier. Part of this improvement is a result of the judiciary putting curbs on their misuse. The more pertinent question is what can the opposition do about these things? Have they gone beyond stage-managed events in the realm of mass politics? What share of AAP’s campaign in Delhi was devoted to a principled defence of federalism? Most of it was focused on trying to convince voters that the BJP would discontinue AAP’s welfare schemes. Has politics around federalism become a politics of tactical convenience where opposition parties agree with each other on certain things (such as more resources from the central government) but not on others (such as the north versus south issues). Is such opportunism blunting the ideological traction of this issue among the masses? Is grass-root political traction for political parties now more delinked from ideological issues such as the state of federalism and only contingent on identity and welfare-based issues? Is politics with the kind of money-power, which India has, even compatible with issues which invoke constitutional values anymore?

To hope that one can find traction for the first two questions without honestly engaging with the third is, in many ways, politically delusional.

Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fallout, and vice-versa.