Delhi Results: Muslims' Dissent Vote Has Lessons for AAP, Congress, BJP & AIMIM

Even amid a BJP surge, the seats with a sizable concentration of Muslims provided some relief to the Aam Aadmi Party. AAP has won Seelampur, Babarpur, Matia Mahal, Ballimaran, Chandni Chowk and Okhla by comfortable margins. The only such seat AAP lost was Mustafabad in Northeast Delhi. The leads, however, don't tell the full picture. A deeper look at the data reveals the following trends and give important lessons to all the parties in the fray, be it AAP, BJP, Congress and AIMIM. Despite its tally of seats reducing drastically from the 62 seats it had won in 2020, AAP retained its bastions in Delhi's Old City area. The party won the Matia Mahal, Chandni Chowk and Ballimaran eats as well as Sadar Bazar that is situated in the vicinity. However, there was a slight reduction in AAP's vote share in these seats and there has been a slight increase in the Congress' vote share.It seems that the nearly one-sided consolidation of Muslims that took place in the 2020 elections, mainly due to the anti-CAA protests, has reduced. However, this reduction in vote share is negligible when compared to the larger disaster AAP has faced. The Seelampur seat in Northeast Delhi is one of the few areas where the AAP has actually made gains. AAP's Chaudhary Zubair Ahmed won the seat, securing a vote share of 59 percent. This is a minor increase of 3 percentage points compared to the 2020 Assembly elections. The win would appear even more significant if one compares it to the setbacks AAP faced in the 2022 MCD elections. AAP failed to come even second in three out of four wards that fall in Seelampur and it came second in the Chauhan Bangar ward. The credit for this win goes largely to AAP bringing on board popular local leader and five-time MLA Chaudhary Mateen Ahmed from the Congress. Ahmed has a good connect among both Muslims and Hindus in the area and is known to champion communal harmony by putting up Hindu-Muslim unity camps during Hindu festivals. AAP fielded Mateen Ahmed's son Chaudhary Zubair in this election, who defeated BJP's Anil Kumar Sharma and former AAP MLA Abdul Rehman, who was contesting on a Congress ticket. In Babarpur seat, senior AAP leader and former minister Gopal Rai secured 53 percent votes, a slight reduction from the 59 percent he got in 2020. He is one of the few senior AAP leaders to retain his seat. Babarpur has a Muslim population of around 40 percent. The only seat with a Muslim population of over 30 percent that AAP has lost is Mustafabad n Northeast Delhi, won by Mohan Singh Bisht of the BJP. AAP's vote share reduced considerably from 53 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2025. The BJP's vote share remained constant at 42 percent. The AAP's votes from 2020 shifted to AIMIM's Tahir Hussain (16 percent) and Ali Mehdi of the Congress (6 percent). Hussain, a former AAP councillor, has been in jail since 2020 as the police has accused him of being involved in the 2020 Northeast Delhi riots. There was considerable anger against AAP in Northeast Delhi as the party was seen as having not taken a stand. The adverse results in Northeast Delhi and Seelampur in the MCD elections were a direct consequence of this. While AAP staged a recovery in Seelampur by bringing in Chaudhary Mateen Ahmed, the resentment against it led to a partial shift of Muslims to Tahir Hussain.AAP's best known Muslim face Amanatullah Khan suffered a scare in Okhla as his vote share reduced from 66 percent in 2015 to 42 percent. This was mainly due to the strong challenge he faced from AIMIM's Shifa-ur-Rehman who polled around 19 percent votes. Rehman, one of the leading figures of the anti-CAA movement, has been jailed under the UAPA. Winning almost 40,000 votes is a huge achievement for Shifa-ur-Rehman, who has very little resources and has no political background. He was also constrained by the fact that he has been in jail and could only come out for a few days on day parole.The election results in these seats have an important lesson for all the parties - AAP, BJP, Congress and AIMIM. AAPWhile AAP has managed to win most of the seats with a sizable concentration of Muslims, its defeat in Mustafabad and also seats like Gandhi Nagar and Jangpura shows that it has lost some ground in the community. While in Mustafabad, AAP's ambivalent stand during the Northeast Delhi violence has harmed the party, in Jangpura, the shift of Muslim votes was partly due to how the party was seen as hounding the Tablighi Jamaat during the first Covid wave. These issues also came up in the campaign in Okhla and have contributed to the decline in Amanatullah Khan's vote percentage. Seelampur and the Old Delhi seats like Matia Mahal and Ballimaran are good examples of what should be done. In these seats, AAP has fielded strong local leaders who are seen as standing by the locals and also are known to carry out development work. BJPThe results also have an important lesson for the BJP. BJP's vote share remained unchanged in Mustafabad and yet it managed to capture the seat from AAP. This is mainly due to the fact that the degree of communal polarisation in this election was much less than 2020. In 2020, Muslims in Mustafabad consoldiate en masse behind AAP mainly because of the hate speeches given by a number of BJP leaders during the campaign. A more issue-based campaign by the BJP this time, made Muslims feel much more secure and express their grievance against AAP. Though BJP didn't field any Muslim candidates, it fielded a number of candidates who have a good equation with Muslims, such as Tarwinder Marwah in Jangpura, Manish Chaudhary in Okhla and Arvinder Singh Lovely in Gandhi Nagar. This is a good practise and reflects the limited utility of the politics of polarisation. Other than a minor increase in vote share in some seats, the Congress had a lacklustre performance in seats with a sizable Muslim population. This is despite the fact that Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi and also leaders like Imran Pratapgarhi campaigned aggressively in these seats. The Congress failed to save its deposit in any of the seats with over 25 percent Muslim population.In fact, in both Okhla and Mustafabad, the Congress wasn't just behind AAP and BJP but also the AIMIM which is contesting Assembly elections in Delhi for the first time.The Congress needs to understand that just being the main alternative to BJP at the national level doesn't mean it can take Muslim votes for granted. The AIMIM with a focused campaign on political prisoners and AAP's alleged betrayal of Muslims managed to capture the imagination of anti-AAP Muslims more than the Congress. Congress also paid the price for losing a mass leader like Chaudhary Mateen Ahmed. Though it failed to win any of the two seats it contested, AIMIM has made an important statement by fielding two individuals charged under the UAPA. This is the first time political prisoners have become an important political plank among Muslims (outside Kashmir). The Lok Sabha campaigns of Independent MPs Amritpal Singh and Engineer Rashid were important in this context. This is a new approach for AIMIM as well. So far the party has relied on bringing in strong Muslim leaders from other parties in its expansion efforts outside of Hyderabad, be it Akhtarul Iman in Bihar's Seemanchal, Mufti Ismail Abdul Khalique in Maharashtra's Malegaon or its former leaders like Ziaur Rehman Barq and Guddu Jamali in Uttar Pradesh. Then the party has also brought in professionals like Syed Imtiyaz Jaleel and Waris Pathan. Jaleel in particular has pursued a different brand of politics that involves making common cause with other community's like Ambedkarite Dalits and Marathas. This is for the first time the party has tried to tap into civil society's energies in its campaign. By most accounts, Shifa-ur-Rehman's campaign in Okhla had assumed a life of its own with independent activists and citizens taking up the campaign on their own. This is a strong takeaway for the AIMIM as its politics evolves with its national expansion efforts.

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Delhi Results: Muslims' Dissent Vote Has Lessons for AAP, Congress, BJP & AIMIM

AAP won most of the seats with a sizable Muslim population, except for Mustafabad.

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Topics: Delhi Elections Delhi Muslims