NEW DELHI: The Election Commission on Tuesday sounded the electoral bugle for a thrilling three-way contest in Delhi with a determined BJP doing all it could to avoid the ruling. AAP of another overwhelming victory. Congress, the third pole of this triangular contest, hopes to make its presence felt.
Elections for the 70 assembly seats in Delhi will be held on February 5 and votes will be counted on February 8, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar announced on Tuesday.
Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP, which won a landslide mandate in the last two Assembly elections, will go for a hat-trick. The AAP supremo released the party’s election campaign song “Phir layenge Kejriwal…” on the same day. Kejriwal asserted that the people of Delhi will express their faith in the working policy followed by his party instead of the “abusive policy” of the BJP. The AAP has already announced all its candidates: party leader Kejriwal is contesting from the New Delhi seat, which he has held since 2013, and chief minister Atishi is seeking re-election from the Kalkaji seat.
Kejriwal claimed that the Delhi elections would be a contest between “the politics of labor and the politics of abuse” and said his party would form the government in the national capital. “This election will be between the politics of labor and the politics of abuse. The people of Delhi will have faith in our politics of labour. We will definitely win,” Kejriwal said in a post on X.
The BJP, on the other hand, is betting this time on opposition to Kejriwal and accusations of corruption against his government. The party has been relentless in its attacks on Kejriwal. The BJP was last in power in Delhi between December 2, 1993 and December 3, 1998, a period during which the national capital had three chief ministers: Madan Lal Khurana, Sahib Singh Verma and Sushma Swaraj.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already launched the party’s campaign with a fierce attack on the AAP government.
He called the AAP government a “disaster” that had hit Delhi, and said that any responsibility given to the “AAP-da” would mean punishment for the people of Delhi. “The AAP-da government has no vision of developing the national capital, and that is what the lotus (BJP’s electoral symbol) is going to bloom in the city and the BJP will usher in change,” said the Prime minister. at a rally last week.
Meanwhile, the Congress is preparing to regain the lost political space in Delhi. The grand party, which ruled Delhi from 1998 to 2013, has been in a political wilderness for more than a decade. The Congress, which had joined hands with the AAP for the Lok Sabha elections, is contesting alone after Kejriwal said no to the alliance. The party has so far announced 48 candidates and its leaders have openly attacked Kejriwal, who remains an ally of the party at the national level under the banner of the INDIA bloc.
AAP’s spectacular political journey in Delhi
The AAP, which was formed in 2012, emerged on Delhi’s political map with an impressive electoral performance in the 2013 assembly elections, winning 28 seats out of 70 and a vote share of 29.5 per cent. The BJP won 32 seats and the Congress 8 seats, with a vote percentage of 32.3 and 24.6 respectively.
However, thereafter there was no turning back for AAP in the assembly elections. It won a massive mandate with a whopping 54.3 per cent votes and 67 seats in the 70-member assembly in 2015. The BJP bagged three seats while the Congress drew a blank, with a vote share of 32.2 and 9.7, respectively.
A more or less similar result was repeated in the 2020 elections: the AAP won 62 seats and 53.6 percent of the votes. The BJP managed to improve its number of seats to 8 with a vote share of 39 per cent, while the Congress again failed to win any seats and its vote share halved to 4.3 per cent.
(With contributions from agencies)
