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NEW DELHI: Finally the Election Commission has set a date for the Delhi elections: February 7. The votes will be counted on Feb 10 in what promises to be an exciting battle between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Aam Aadmi Party with the Congress not really in the picture.
An early Cicero opinion polls is giving 34-40 of the 70 Assembly seats to the BJP and 25-31 seats to AAP with the Congress reduced to less than five seats. However, conversely and is as it often is in such opinion polls 35 per cent of the respondents picked AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal for the post of chief minister. The poll of course makes no effort to reconcile the two predictions thereby appearing far more open ended than it gives itself the credit for!
The fight to the finish is on between the BJP and AAP.This is clear, and the former is finding it difficult to keep pace with Kejriwal and his team that have been working around the clock holding meetings in almost every corner of every Assembly constituency; holding Delhi dialogues with cross sections of society; using FM radio for incessant broadcasts with special messages from Kejriwal long before the BJP moved in with its money and far higher number now of advertisment slots. AAP has been offering specific proposals as a result of its Delhi dialogues for almost every issue including women safety, power price reduction, availability of water and infrastructure amongst other things.
The BJP is sorely feeling the absence of a chief ministerial candidate and face. Kejriwal again stole a march over it with a cheeky campaign of posters on auto rickshaws asking people whether they would vote for him, or for BJP’s Jagdish Mukhi. This went on for weeks before the BJP finally reacted, and started a poster campaign of its own but without the same impact. Interestingly the auto rickshaw constituency has remained faithful to AAP.
The BJP campaign in Delhi will centre around Prime Minister Narendra Modi who will remain its star campaigner. The party has started emulating the Congress style, and will elect a Chief Minister after the polls according to current indications.
The BJP has made a concerted effort to break the AAP hold in the resettlement colonies on the outskirts of Delhi like Trilokpuri. Here communal violence has fractured the Balmiki-Muslim consolidation behind AAP in the past Assembly elections. It remains to be seen whether AAP has over the past few weeks managed to regain the ground it had lost in these areas.
Rising prices is a major issue that the BJP will have to contend with in these elections. With the Congress having gone there is no real anti-incumbency factor that the BJP can rely on, as it was exhausted in the last elections. AAP despite the charge of having run away from the government now finds that its early action in bringing down the power bills is standing it in good stead with the Delhi voters citing this as a concrete example of an action bound program. In fact the Modi government at the centre, because of its proximity, is really facing a level of anti-incumbency sentiment at this stage. It will be up to the Prime Minister to take the edge off this during his campaign.
There is some unease within the BJP as Kejriwal continues to be a factor in the elections. It is too early to say to what extent he will cut into what the BJP looks upon at its own vote, but as AAP workers told The Citizen, “our graph is rising.”
The Varanasi campaign will be played out on the streets of Delhi this time, with Kejriwal willy nilly pitted against PM Modi in the absence of a chief ministerial candidate for the BJP.
