swept the parliamentary elections here with the party candidates registering victory with handsome margins in all the seven Lok Sabha seats on May 16. The last time the BJP won all the seven seats in Delhi was in 1999 when the National Democratic Alliance led by the BJP came to power at the Centre.

The electoral outcome also bucked predictions of almost all the exit polls that gave the Aam Aadmi Party two to three seats in Delhi. However, the Arvind Kejriwalled party gave the BJP a close fight with party candidates securing second position in all the seven constituencies even as the Congress was relegated to the third place. The Congress had won all the seven seats in 2009 general elections.

However, four of the seven sitting Congress MPs including Union Minister Krishna Tirath, J.P. Agarwal, Ramesh Kumar and Mahabal Mishra lost their security deposit this time round. Other big Congress names who bit the dust included Union Minister Kapil Sibal, AICC general secretary Ajay Maken and the former Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s son, Sandeep Dikshit