As the Aam Aadmi Party celebrates its spectacular victory in Punjab and describes it as the beginning of its journey to becoming a national phenomenon, its far less successful forays in the other states in this round of elections offer party the sobering thought that making a mark electorally nation-wide would be an uphill task.
While the decade-old party has repeated its Delhi-like stupendous electoral outing in Punjab, winning a landslide victory and decimating the established parties and their stalwarts, its performance in other states has not provided much to write home.
The victory in Punjab has come after an effort spanning around seven years, starting with the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, when it had got a surprise haul of four seats. It was tipped to win in the state polls in 2017, but failed to make the cut in the face of a spirited campaign by Congress veteran Captain Amarinder Singh, and according to experts, also because of some missteps it took.
In Goa, another state where the AAP has been working for years and has managed to have got its presence marked, the party has failed to yield a similar dividend. The AAP's initiatives were seen with a lot of interest in the assembly elections in 2017 as well, and there was immense hype about the party's chances. However, it had failed to win a single seat even as it managed to get 6.2 per cent votes.
This time round, the AAP has opened its account, winning two seats, and improved its vote percentage marginally, getting 6.8 per cent votes. The highlight of the AAP's Goa outing was its candidate Venzy Viegas, who was formerly in the merchant navy, defeating veteran politician and former chief minister Churchill Alemao, who had joined the Trinamool Congress in the run up to the elections. AAP's Cruz Silva was the party's other successful candidate. He defeated Congress' Savio D'Silva by a mere 169 votes. However, the AAP's chief ministerial face Amit Palekar lost the election, and so did its state unit chief Rahul Mhambre.
In Uttarakhand, another state where the AAP has been trying to make a breakthrough and had even declared a chief ministerial face – former army officer Ajay Kothiyal – it failed to win a single seat and managed to get just 3.3 per cent votes. In Uttar Pradesh, where the enterprising Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh is in-charge of the party's affairs in the state, the party got just 0.38 per cent votes.
Juxtaposed with the party's remarkable victory in Punjab, its underwhelming performance in the other states shows that its plans to replicate the Punjab electoral achievement elsewhere will not be easy.
