What went wrong with AAP—and what, if anything, remains

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Former Chief Minister and AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal reaches High Court in New Delhi on April 6, 2026. | Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap/ The HinduBorn out of the 2011 anti-corruption movement, the AAP once represented a genuine disruption in Indian politics—sweeping Delhi with 67 of 70 seats in 2015 and promising a new kind of governance for the aam aadmi. A decade later, the collapse is hard to overstate. The party won only 22 seats in the 2025 Delhi elections, its top leaders faced arrest in a liquor policy scam, and the last week of April 2026 brought the most visible sign yet of a party fracturing from within: seven MPs—including Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, and Harbhajan Singh—quit and are expected to join the BJP. Kejriwal tried personally to stop them. He could not.The reports and analyses collected below were published over the past several years, but read together now, they serve as a sharp background to what is unfolding—and offer pointers to where AAP may be headed. From the centralisation of power around one leader, to the contradictions of a party that campaigned on clean governance and stands accused of the opposite, to the voters who believed and then stopped—they trace how it came to this, and ask whether AAP can survive as anything more than a Punjab government on borrowed time. With elections in Gujarat, Goa, and Punjab approaching, the party must stabilise, rebuild, and persuade its own workers that the movement still means something. Whether it can is far from certain.Read on: