Delhi polls: AAP, Cong win 5 each |
The bypolls in 13 municipal wards of Municipal Corporation of Delhi threw up surprising results , kindling hopes of a revival in the Congress -which won four seats out of nowhere and was quickly joined by a rebel winner — while jolting the Aam Aadmi Party’s expectation of a cakewalk in next year’s civic polls and leaving the BJP lagging in third place.Making its debut in municipal elections, AAP won five seats while the incumbent BJP, which held seven of the wards, was reduced to just three wins despite having the highest voteshare.While it bagged the highest number of wards, AAP’s performance comes as a wake-up call for the party which had swept the Delhi assembly just over a year ago, wiping out the Congress and reducing BJP to three seats. Its promise of providing an alternative to the traditional politics of BJP and Congress is clearly not swaying voters in its strongholds — slums and low-income settlements — like before.The results indicate that the municipal elections of 2017 may well turn out to be a triangular contest. Congress’s gains in the civic bypolls came largely among voters it had lost to AAP in the 2013 and 2015 assembly polls. The party had not won a single of these 13 wards over two municipal polls, 2007 and 2012.
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