Delhi poll results in charts: BJP returns to power after 27 years

With this win, the BJP has ended the decade-long rule of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and returned to power in Delhi after a gap of 27 years. Securing this small yet strategically and symbolically significant state solidifies the BJP’s political dominance.

Read this | Why Modi’s BJP has raced ahead of Kejriwal’s AAP in the battle for Delhi

For AAP, a relatively young party, this defeat is a major setback in the stronghold that gave it rise, and could have far-reaching implications for its future trajectory.

Here are five charts capturing the final election results of Delhi.

Seat position

The BJP finished in pole position, winning in 48 of 70 seats. That is 13 seats more than the halfway mark and a gain of 40 seats over its showing in the 2020 state elections.

AAP, which had swept Delhi with 62 seats in 2020, dropped to 22 seats, and will sit for the first time on the Opposition benches in Delhi.

Read this | The battle for Delhi: It is Kejriwal’s suvidha vs Modi’s vikas

The Indian National Congress (INC), the third major party in the fray and still the longest ruler in Delhi's history, continued its spell in the wilderness and did not win a seat.

Prominent losers include Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia and Saurabh Bharadwaj, three of AAP’s tallest leaders. From the BJP, prominent winners included Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma, Arvinder Singh Lovely and Kailash Gahlot.

Vote share

Delhi recorded an overall voter turnout of 60.5% in 2025, which was about 2 percentage points lower than 62.5% in 2020. Women registered a higher turnout than men.

As with seats, the BJP led all parties in vote share, too. It secured a vote share of 47.2%, which is lower than the 54.4% it polled in the 2024 general election in Delhi's seven Lok Sabha seats, but nearly 9% higher than what it secured in 2020.

By comparison, AAP’s vote share fell from 53.6% in 2020 to 43.6% in 2025. The INC’s insignificance in Delhi continues—its vote share had gone from 48% in 2003 to 25% in 2013 to 4.3% in 2020. In 2025, it ended up at 6.3%.

AAP had fought the 2024 general elections in alliance with the INC. In Delhi’s seven Lok Sabha seats, at the assembly constituency (AC) level, this was split into 40 ACs for AAP and 30 ACs for INC. However, the two parties did not extend their alliance to the 2025 state election. In this election, the AAP-INC combined vote share (49.9%) is higher than that of the BJP (42.3%).

Win margins

This election was a tighter contest than in 2020. In 38 of Delhi’s 70 constituencies, the winning party had a margin of over 10%, with the BJP winning in 26 of these and AAP in 12. However, in 18 constituencies, the win margin was below 5%. While AAP won six of these seats, BJP won 12.

Turncoat candidates—those who switched parties—did well in this election. As many as 9 out of 22 turncoat candidates won. In the 2020 election, only 9 out of 31 won.

BJP comeback

Delhi’s first election in its current legislative assembly form took place in 1993. It was won by the BJP, and that five-year term saw three chief ministerial changes—Madan Lal Khurana, Sahib Singh Verma and Sushma Swaraj. In the 1998 election, the BJP lost to the INC, which went on to rule the state till 2013, and establish party leader and three-time chief minister Sheila Dikshit as an able administrator who also commanded substantial political clout.

The emergence of AAP in 2013 changed Delhi's politics. In what was a straight fight between the BJP and INC, Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP entered as the third axis, and soon started setting the benchmarks for politics and governance. It has taken the BJP well over a decade, and tactics that have been ungainly at times, to unseat AAP. For the first time since 1993, the vote share of the BJP crossed 40% in the Delhi state election.

State-Central Split

In its short history of just over a decade, AAP has always done far better in the Delhi state elections than in the Delhi seats for Lok Sabha. The difference has been stark.

In 2015, it secured a 21.4% mark-up in Assembly vote share over the preceding national elections. In 2020, it increased this mark-up to 35.5%. However, in this election, this is down to 19.5%.

AAP is staring at a considerably diminished presence in Delhi. It is a party with significantly fewer resources and is now in power in only one state, Punjab. 

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Its leader Arvind Kejriwal is seen by the BJP as one of its principal challengers, and the party will relish this opportunity to weaken his hand. This result could have massive implications on where AAP goes from here.

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