AAP's Delhi win a landmark in poll history

Only Sikkim has seen bigger sweeps, with one party having won all seats in the Assembly sometimes.

The Aam Aadmi Party’s landslide victory on Tuesday is among the most comprehensive victories in the history of Indian elections.

Only Sikkim has seen bigger sweeps, with one party having won all seats in the Assembly sometimes.

The AAP won 67 of the 70 seats, or nearly 96 per cent. Its performance is by far the best ever in the State.

Sikkim saw India’s three most comprehensive electoral wins ever: the Nar Bahadur Bhandari-led Sikkim Sangram Parishad, and the incumbent five-time Chief Minister Pawan Kumar Chamling’s Sikkim Democratic Front have both won all 32 seats in one election each, The Hindu and the Ashoka University Political Data Centre’s analysis shows. In 2004, Mr. Chamling’s party won 31 of the 32 seats. In terms of seat share, the Aam Aadmi Party’s performance is next only to these.

The performance of Mr. Bhandari’s party in its first election in 1985, after he dissolved his Sikkim Janata Parishad and formed the SSP, comes next to the AAP’s. In 1962, in Jammu and Kashmir’s first Assembly elections since the arrest of Sheikh Abdullah, the National Conference, headed by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, swept to power, and in 1967, the Congress swept Tripura, the only two other Assembly elections in which a party got over 90 per cent of all seats.

In terms of vote share, however, the AAP is a bit further along the honour scroll, coming in at 13th in the all-time list, with Sikkim parties on the top of the list again.

In all, there have been 37 Assembly elections in which the winner has got over 50 per cent of the voteshare and just seven of these, including the AAP, were in this century.