While many assembly constituencies saw the winners get a sweep with an unchallenging vote margin, at least 12 seats saw winning margin of less than 5,000 votes and thee saw a small margin of less than 1,000. Among the 70 assembly constituencies, the highest vote difference was in Matia Mahal where the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Aaley Mohammed Iqbal defeated BJP’s Deepti Indora by 42,724 votes.
Iqbal secured 58,120votes while Indora got 15,396 votes. Matia Mahal is a legacy seat for Iqbal, where his father Shoiab Iqbal is the only six-time MLA of the Delhi assembly who secured victory from 1993 to 2020. He was earlier a part of Janata Dal and then switched loyalties to the AAP in 2020. When he decided to retire this year, he passed the baton to his son.
“I have set four records since I started my political journey. The first was in 2012 when I became Delhi’s youngest contestant at 22, and then the youngest MCD chairman of city zone. The third record was when I fought the councillor elections and all 13 candidates against me had to forfeit their deposits. The latest achievement is winning by 42,500 votes, the highest margin in Delhi. These aren’t just records, they show my constant presence with the public, like my father did for 30 years and the people’s love for me,” Iqbal said.
Seelampur is the seat with second highest vote margin — at 42,477 — where AAP’s Chaudhary Zubair Ahmad defeated BJP’s Anil Kumar Sharma, followed by the Deoli constituency where Prem Chauhan from AAP defeated BJP’s Deepak Tanwar by a difference of 36,680 votes.
Vijender Gupta of the BJP won the Rohini seat by a big margin. He defeated AAP’s Pardeep Mittal by a margin of 37,816 votes.
Among the seats that saw a low victory margin — under 5,000 votes — nine have been won by BJP and four by AAP. The lowest victory margin was logged at Sangam Vihar where the BJP candidate Chandan Kumar Chaudhary won by 344 votes, defeating three-time AAP MLA Dinesh Mohaniya.
“We work on fulfilling Modi Ji’s dream of making Delhi beautiful. I will be working on issues like water, roads and education on priority. AAP has received what they gave to the people of this constituency by forcing them to live in such poor conditions,” Chaudhary said after winning the Sangam Vihar seat.
Suresh Kumar, 29, a resident of the locality, said, “I wanted BJP to come to power this time because I feel it is time for change. I have no such preference towards any political party but I want the state government to just address the problems that people of our locality as well as the city face. My area has really bad roads and intense sewerage and drainage problems.”
“Now, hopefully a change in the people’s choice of government will shake the city authorities awake,” Kumar, who works as a security guard in a private office, said.
On the other hand, there were some residents who wanted to give a chance to Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP government. Munni Devi, 50, said, “Kejriwal cared for the city and most importantly, its people. We get free electricity, our children get to go to good schools now and I get to take free bus rides to my office where I work as a cook. I just hope that these schemes continue, as BJP has promised before.”
There were other seats too where the vote margin did not show much confidence in the winning candidate.
The second lowest victory margin was 392 votes in Trilokpuri where BJP’s Ravi Kant secured 58,217 votes, and defeated AAP’s Anjana Parcha — who got 57,825 votes. The seats with low margin also include those where some of the top AAP leaders lost.
Jangpura, from where former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia contested, the BJP candidate Tarvinder Singh Marwah won by 675 votes. In Greater Kailash, BJP’s Shikha Roy defeated AAP’s Saurabh Bhardwaj by 3,188 votes and in Malviya Nagar, BJP’s Satish Upadhyay defeated AAP’s Somnath Bharti by 2,131 votes. In Rajinder Nagar, BJP’s Umang Bajaj won from AAP’s Durgesh Pathak by 1,231 votes.
(with inputs from Aheli Das)
