(Ashok Malik is a columnist and writer living in Delhi.)
There's a lot riding on the upcoming Delhi assembly election, voting for which is expected in late January or early February. Delhi is a small state, but by virtue of being just so urbanised and the seat of the national capital as well as the national media, it gets disproportionate attention. Correctly or incorrectly, this tends to make the Delhi assembly election a reckoner of the urban mood, at least in north India.
State elections are rarely referenda on the union government. Delhi is a bit of an exception to this. It is the one state where perceptions about the union government do matter, at least to some degree. In the winter of 2013, the unpopularity of the Manmohan Singh government did reflect in the defeat of the Sheila Dikshit government, though it is a fair bet that the Dikshit government would have lost anyway.
Much has changed since that previous assembly election, where the BJP finished the single-largest party but could not get a majority, and the Aam Aadmi Party, by winning 28 seats in a house of 70, performed stunningly. In that election, the Congress had been crippled. Of its traditional voters, it had retained only Muslims. Five of the eight seats the party won were in minority-dominated areas. It had lost the middle classes to the BJP and AAP, and had to share the urban poor with AAP.
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