The Aam Aadmi Party’s staggering victory in the Delhi Assembly elections was all that, and more. It was the first decisive, complete and humiliating rout suffered by the BJP since Mr Modi became Prime Minister, with no redeeming features whatever. That it happened in India’s capital, where the BJP had won all seven Lok Sabha seats eight months ago, only magnifies the debacle’s magnitude.

AAP’s victory was sweeping: 67/70 seats, and 54.3 percent of the vote, even higher than the Janata Party’s 52.6 percent in the historic post-Emergency “wave” election of 1977. But it had a strong class angle to it: AAP unabashedly championed the cause of the poor and dispossessed.

According to a Lokniti-CSDS post-election survey, 66 percent of Delhi’s poor voted for AAP, fully three times more than those who favoured the BJP. AAP also got majority support (57 and 51 percent) from the lower-middle class and middle class. Even the better-off supported it (47 percent) over the BJP (43 percent). The poor and lower-middle class, with monthly family incomes under Rs 17,000, account for 60 percent of the population. AAP’s win is their victory.

Similarly, a majority of Dalits and OBCs, especially lower OBCs, favoured AAP. It won all the 12 Scheduled Caste-reserved seats. Overall, 68 percent of all Dalits backed AAP. A majority of Brahmins, Banias, Rajputs and other upper castes backed the BJP, but they didn’t vote overwhelmingly against AAP. For instance, over 40 percent of Brahmins and Rajputs backed AAP.

To top it all, 77 percent of Muslims (who form 12 percent of Delhi’s population) and 57 percent of Sikhs voted for AAP—a much higher proportion than in 2013. This gives AAP a far more inclusive character, centred on the poor majority, than the BJP can ever dream of.

The poor voted enthusiastically for AAP and angrily against the BJP. No wonder AAP’s average winning margin (28,670 votes) was four times higher than the BJP’s: only one BJP candidate won by a margin exceeding 10,000.

The BJP suffered a historic rout despite running an energetic, well-micromanaged, opulently financed campaign designed by the Modi-Amit Shah duo. Their strategy followed the recipe perfected for their Lok Sabha victory: polarise voters on caste, class and religious lines; appeal to crass Hindu-supremacism, sectarian identities and jingoism; and hype up the skewed, inequality-enhancing “Gujarat model” to win upper-caste-upper-class elite votes.

The supercharged campaign sought to manufacture a larger-than-life image for Mr Modi. When he failed to draw crowds, Mr Shah roped in Ms Kiran Bedi, and also drafted the entire Union cabinet, 120 MPs, and one lakh RSS volunteers into the campaign. Ms Bedi’s parachuting only worsened the Delhi BJP’s crisis. Yet, it would wrong to blame her or campaign-specific factors for the BJP’s rout.

The BJP was trounced primarily because Mr Modi’s popularity is declining nationally, and the BJP is seen as arrogantly pro-rich, sectarian, divisive and loutishly communal. Mr Modi has failed to deliver on his promise of “less government, more governance”, higher growth, and more jobs—a hugely important (if mythical) lure propagated during the April-May campaign. His big-ticket schemes including “Swacchh Bharat”, Jan Dhan Yojana and “smart cities” are all empty slogans.

Mr Modi is increasingly seen as elitist and vain. He changes his attire three times a day. His Rs 10-lakh suit with his own name woven into its fabric has been described by a British paper as the Emperor’s “new clothes” needed to provide “reassurance” to a “self-aggrandising and insecure megalomaniac”. The suit will damage him more and longer than “India Shining” hurt the BJP.

With his pro-rich policies, Mr Modi is offering enormous tax-breaks to Big Business, opening up reserved forests to predatory mining and industry projects, dismantling environmental regulations, and taking medicines out of the reach of common people by amending patent laws to please the US.

Worse, Mr Modi is seen as anti-poor. His government has raised rail fares and milk prices, failed to lower petrol/diesel prices in line with falling crude prices. It has savagely cut the National Rural Employment Guarantee budget, and is preparing to severely restrict the Public Distribution System for food and remove such meagre labour protection as exists by allowing employers to hire and fire at will—when unemployment is rife.

The government’s shamefully pro-corporate land acquisition ordinance will displace millions of farmers without a public hearing and social or environmental impact assessment. The ordinance is one reason why the BJP lost all 14 seats in rural Delhi; in 2013, it won 13 of them.

The Delhi defeat may appear sudden, but it’s the culmination of the BJP’s post-May decline, relative to its Lok Sabha showing, which began immediately. It performed poorly in some 50 Assembly byelections, followed by municipal and local-body elections. More vitally, its showing was below-par in elections to the Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Haryana, and Jammu and Kashmir Assemblies.

In Maharashtra last October, the BJP aimed at winning a majority on its own. It spurned an alliance with the Shiv Sena, but had to crawl back to it to form the government. In Jharkhand, its score plummeted from 12/14 Lok Sabha seats to 37/81 Assembly seats. In Kashmir, its boastful “Plan 44+”—to win a majority in the 87-strong Assembly, including seats in the Kashmir Valley—crashed; it could win only 25 seats, all in the Jammu region.

Such an early downturn in state after state is highly unusual within the first months of a party winning a national election. It highlighted the shallow base of the BJP, which won only 31 percent of the national vote, and made May-2014 look almost like a flash in the pan.

Meanwhile, the Sangh Parivar created serious insecurity among numerous religious and ethnic groups, including Northeastern Indians, described in the BJP vision document as “immigrants”. Its hysterical anti-minority campaigns, including hate-speech, ghar-wapsi and Godse-worship, are tacitly backed by BJP bosses. Mr Modi has failed to restrain those who run them. There’s growing realisation among many that at work here isn’t the BJP’s “lunatic fringe”; it’s the BJP itself. They wrongly elected an extremist party which promises the moon, but doesn’t, cannot, deliver.

AAP was able to project itself as a credible alternative, indeed as a pro-poor moral force, of the kind the Left once was, but recently ceased to be—irreverent towards authority, militant in opposing hierarchy and privilege based on birth, passionately egalitarian, and ready to bring “the world’s largest democracy” down to earth through expanded rights for people and greater public accountability for rulers.

The exuberance that AAP’s victory has generated among the poor and underprivileged has to be seen to be believed. AAP’s triumphant emergence as a giant-killer will alter political equations on a disproportionate scale, as with all game-changers. The Delhi result will revive the opposition, including the Janata Parivar, with an impact in Bihar and Punjab (AAP has four MPs here) where Assembly elections are due soon, where the BJP could be put on the defensive.

AAP’s victory has further marginalised the Congress. This isn’t a good thing for Indian democracy, which needs a middle-of-the-road umbrella party with multiple currents in it, in place of a system dominated by a strong Right-wing party like the BJP. But the Congress must realise that the Gandhi family, in particular Rahul, is a millstone around its neck. It needs a new leadership to rejuvenate it.

The Left and regional parties will do well to learn from AAP’s local democracy-based approach, its frequent consultation with mohalla committees, and frankly, from its unabashed populism.

Populism is a much maligned word in the Indian media. But in its original, authentic sense—prioritising redistribution over growth, advancing the agenda of social justice, and attacking the political establishment “for being self-serving and deaf to the needs of the ordinary citizen”—it’s a healthy thing. We need more populism and less pandering to the rich and powerful.

AAP is planning to target Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Odisha, which have seemingly become single-party states. How it does there will be determined by its own performance in Delhi. To deliver on its promises of subsidised water and power, AAP should avoid hasty decisions and consult people-centred and equity-oriented experts like Prayas Energy Group (Pune), Yamuna Bachao Abhiyan, former power secretary EAS Sarma, and activists like Himanshu Thakkar.

AAP must also be more open to working with other parties and civil society groups on issues of popular concern, like secularism, human rights, the land acquisition law, and rights to food, housing, healthcare and education. That’s where its future lies. (IPA Service)