Click to play videoNew Delhi: Hours before the final results for the state assembly seats were declared, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) knew it had lost Delhi.
BJP spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy said that probably the choice of candidate was wrong.
However, both parties, the victors and the defeated, acknowledged that Delhi was won and lost in a clash of personalities.
BJP's Vijay Kumar Malhotra couldn't match up to Shiela Dikshit's appeal as a chief minister pushing development and modernising Delhi.
The BJP also acknowledged that its campaign based on the two issues of price rise and terror clearly didn't resonate with the voter.
Inflation was down to single digit by the time Delhi got to vote and the party's effort to play the Mumbai terror attack to its advantage with full page newspaper advertisements and posters didn't pay off either.
Delhi voted only a day after the Mumbai siege ended and yet V K Malhotra has been left a disappointed man.
However, the one factor that saved the BJP from a bigger disappointment was Mayawati's Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) that showed considerable muscle eating into 12 per cent of the vote, most of it from the Congress' kitty but even that couldn't keep Sheila Dikshit from a historic hat trick.
She is among the handful chief ministers in the country to have achieved this feat.
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