New Delhi, India (May 18, 2014): From four months ago — when it had surprised poll pundits and perhaps itself to win 28 Delhi Assembly seats — to its failure to win even a single Lok Sabha seat in the Delhi, Aam Aadmi Party’s dramatic slide of fortunes may be some sort of a record for any party.
And no sooner had the first results started trickling in, there seemed more trouble for AAP internally with Ilyas Azmi, its political affairs committee member, blaming Arvind Kejriwal’s “autocratic style of functioning” for the rout.
“The party has no performance anywhere except Punjab. The reason is that one man — Kejriwal — hijacked the decision-making process in the name of Swaraj. There is no inner party democracy, PAC was never consulted either on leaving the government or in the matter of ticket distribution. It is just the Arvind-Manish clique that is running the party,” said Ilyas Azmi.
Other AAP leaders made little effort to hide their disappointment with the Delhi results or that the party may have paid the price for Kejriwal’s hasty resignation.
The party has four seats in Punjab as consolation prize but the Delhi defeat clearly rankles. Both Yogendra Yadav — who came fourth in Gurgaon — and Kejriwal have admitted that the Delhi results have been a shocker.
Yadav, along with Sanjay Singh, had been among the prime votaries of the plan to contest as many seats as possible. When the party’s political affairs committee meets, possibly next week, dissension is inevitable over whether Kejriwal’s formula of contesting limited seats with full force would have paid better dividends. Yadav says had the party adopted that formula, it would have never contested Fatehgarh Saheb and Faridkot, both of which it won.