Finally, elections for the Delhi Assembly will be held on February 7. And it is clear at the outset that the battle will again between the Aam Aadmi Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party. The others will be on the fringes if at all, with the Congress Party clearly not having revived even slightly during the intervening period.
The BJP swept all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi and that should be an indicator of what it is hoping to achieve in the Assembly polls. However, even in states like Jharkhand and Maharashtra, its assembly performance fell far short of its Lok Sabha performance, and this does give some hope to the AAP and its leader, Arvind Kejriwal.
Two factors are going against the BJP in Delhi. One, being so close to the centre, the Delhi electorate—particularly the urban poor—are not particularly happy with the performance of the Modi Government on the price rise front. This is emerging as a big issue, with the price of vegetables and essential commodities touching the skies in the capital of India. This, when contrasted with the brief tenure of the AAP Government where power bills were slashed, works well for the latter, and badly for the BJP.
The second major factor is that the AAP has a chief ministerial candidate in Kejriwal and the BJP has none. The AAP is pressing home this advantage at every available opportunity, starting with its campaign when posters appeared behind autorickshaws carrying Kerjiwal’s portrait alongside BJP leader Jagdish Mukhi and asking the Delhi voters who they would like to have as their chief minister. Mukhi finally protested, more so as he has not been named by the party and is still amongst several contenders.
The BJP is again planning to cut the AAP’s forward march with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He will be the party’s star campaigner, and will be addressing several rallies in the capital region before polling day. The party is optimistic that his oratory skills will again charm the Delhi electorate into casting the ballot for the BJP, and that Kejriwal — as in Varanasi — will be eclipsed. This has become the party strategy in all the Assembly elections, with PM Modi being the one and only leader to solicit votes for the BJP. Some other leaders will canvass in Delhi as well, but it is the Prime Minister the party is counting on.
A third factor, although not as important as the above two, that works for the AAP, is that it has stayed put. And in doing so, has managed to override the BJP campaign against Kejriwal for being a ‘bhagoda’ and running away from governance. Kejriwal has taken this head-on and managed to deal with it sufficiently to ensure that it does not remain an issue in the forthcoming polls.
He has hit the ground running, with the first of what promises to be a series of exposes against BJP leaders. He has hit out at the state BJP chief for exploiting links with the power discoms, an emotional and highly political issue as power tariffs as well as availability of power are both issues for the Delhi voters. The news that the BJP state chief had set up a company to exploit the linkages will have an impact certainly.
There have been differences between the AAP leadership that have found their way into the media. But lately, the fissures seem to have been stemmed somewhat, with Kejriwal walking the extra mile to deal with the problems facing the party. He is not particularly worried about his former colleague Shazia Ilmi joining the BJP, as this is not going to help either her or her new party. Instead he retweeted her earlier assertions where she had attacked both the BJP and the Congress, for communalism and hypocrisy.
The Congress remains in the fray but is also without a clear leadership in place. The Congress has slept through the intervening months, and done nothing to improve its standing amongst the voters. It was rejected in the last elections and will be rejected again in the forthcoming polls.
It does seem though that a grand alliance of the opposition parties against the BJP is not going to happen. The Left parties have already announced their decision to contest the seats en bloc and in a statement, have condemned the BJP, Congress and AAP in the same breath.The BJP will be using the argument it has in most states, that a government in Delhi will strengthen the hands of PM Modi at the centre.
Interestingly, from being nowhere in the reckoning, the AAP seems to be making its presence felt now. It has formed ward-level committees already, and this time around, has expanded its organisation to include youth and women organisations. This was not the case before. The AAP has also expanded its agenda through a series of calibrated Delhi dialogues, whereby it has added new issues to its earlier one point anti-corruption campaign, and has also given teeth to these by spelling out some precise measures it would implement on each if elected to power. Women’s safety and security is one major issue that Kejriwal and his colleagues have been highlighting.
All in all, a rough fight. And ironically, again the campaign will see Kejriwal pitted against Narendra Modi. As in Varanasi. The difference being that in Delhi both, the BJP and the AAP are equally prepared for the polls, and the scales on this one are not tilted towards anyone.
Seema Mustafa
