Yesterday the election fiasco in Gujarat culminated with the BJP bagging a majority in the state by winning 99 seats, the Congress came a not so distant second by winning 77.
One party though which failed to mark its presence was the Aam Aadmi Party, which as per reports has lost deposits on all the 33 seats it contested in the state. The embarrassment for the party didn’t stop here and reports have even claimed that it has polled lower votes than even NOTA on a few of the seats.
AAP during the Gujarat elections decided to contest only 33 out of the total 182 seats, possibly in order to give themselves a higher chance of winning them. Things though didn’t work out as planned and the party lost deposits in all of them.
Things were so bad that on five seats, AAP candidates even polled votes lower than NOTA:
| Constituency | AAP Votes | NOTA Votes |
|---|---|---|
| Ankleshwar | 243 | 2732 |
| Botad | 361 | 1334 |
| Manjalpur | 282 | 2246 |
| Chhota Udaipur | 4551 | 5870 |
| Dasada | 1334 | 3796 |
The highest votes the party polled were in Chhota Udaipur where they bagged 4,551 votes, thereby finishing fourth.
Things though didn’t start so badly for the AAP, if its supremo Arvind Kejriwal was to be believed. His tweets from 2016 projected that the BJP was in a very dilapidated state in Gujarat and AAP was the one to benefit from it:
https://twitter.com/ArvindKejriwal/status/751749508787240960?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
This does raise the question as to whether the party knew in advance about its poor performance and as a result decided to spread EVM tampering conspiracy theories:
https://twitter.com/AAPGujarat/status/941146420232511489?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/PreetiSMenon/status/942616014537113600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Based on AAP’s performance, people might even ask as to whether the party’s dream of becoming a pan India force is all but dead.