Soul-searching: Besides mandate for Manmohan, drubbing a referendum against BJP’s state leadership, say Delhi BJP insiders

The Congress swept the Lok Sabha elections in Delhi, with the party pocketing all seven seats in the city-state. Saturday's results, after the convincing victory in last November's Assembly elections, have as good as made the Capital a Congress fortress.

The scale of the sweep is found in the victory margins, the lowest being 93,000 for the party's South Delhi candidate Ramesh Kumar. The victory margin was over a lakh in each of the other six seats.

Meanwhile, after the massacre, the postmortem has begun for BJP in Delhi. But before that, it's the frustration and rage of the party's cadre with the top state leadership that held sway on Saturday. While voters said the Congress landslide — a 7-0 victory — has been a vote of confidence for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, BJP workers say it is also a referendum against the Delhi BJP leadership. “The results show the BJP has completely lost its relevance in Delhi for now,” a senior Delhi Congress leader said. BJP insiders stopped just short of agreeing. In South Delhi constituency, now a rural belt that showed one of the lowest victory margins (just over 90,000 votes), BJP leaders said infighting led to Ramesh Bidhuri’s defeat. In fact, Ramesh Kumar, brother of former Congress candidate Sajjan Kumar, was trailing in the morning — till the late surge in the afternoon saw the result take a U-turn.

... contd.