NEW DELHI: A stunning performance by an upstart anti-corruption party helped topple India’s ruling Congress in elections to New Delhi’s state assembly Sunday, only months before the country goes to the polls.

Congress, in power at national level for a decade, also lost in three other state assembly contests after vote counting on Sunday in a devastating blow ahead of next year’s general election.

“I would like to congratulate the people of Delhi for starting a trend of honest politics,” said Arvind Kejriwal, leader of the fledgling Aam Aadmi Party (Common People’s Party), after he unseated the capital’s Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit in her own constituency.

Kejriwal, who only launched his party a year ago, said his movement “will not be limited to Delhi alone, but will spread across the entire country and will be successful in getting rid of corruption and inflation.”

A shell-shocked Dikshit said she would “analyze later what went wrong.” “All I can say is that the people of Delhi have taken a decision which we respect,” she added.

Aam Aadmi, which tapped into widespread anger over corruption under Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, even managed to deprive the main Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of a majority.

Final results showed the BJP had won 31 of the 70 Delhi assembly seats while Aam Aadmi had captured 28. Congress trailed in third with just eight, down from 43.

The BJP also won by a landslide in the states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, and secured a narrow victory over Congress in restive Chhattisgarh. Votes will be counted in the remote Congress-ruled state of Mizoram on Monday.

The remarkable rise of the bespectacled Kejriwal from the ashes of a street protest movement two years ago has shaken national parties which, only days before Sunday’s results, had dismissed the buzz around the new party as hype.