Aap And Kejriwal Gear Up To Reclaim Delhi

AAP and Kejriwal gear up to reclaim Delhi. But will the Congress play a spoiler by splitting the non-BJP vote?

- Kaushik Deka and Gulam Jeelani

With elections to the 70-member Delhi assembly less than a month away, the BJP, Congress and AAP are busy sharpening their respective poll strategies—from candidate selection to the election campaign to working out the caste arithmetic. Not only will the Delhi election kick off the first electoral contest of 2020, it also comes after the BJP lost power in five states last year and performed below par in a sixth. It will also set the stage for elections in six states in the next 18 months—Bihar in the second half of this year, and Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry, West Bengal and Assam in 2021.

Candidate selection is the primary challenge for all three rivals. The fact that it is being micro-managed by the national heads of both the Congress and BJP underlines the significance of winning the national capital. The BJP brass has held back-to-back marathon sessions, chaired by no less than the Union minister for home Amit Shah, to finalise the candidates. In the Congress camp, party president Sonia Gandhi herself led the discussions on the party candidates. AAP has retained 46 MLAs, dropped another 15, and included 24 new names. It is also fielding Atishi, Raghav Chadha and Dilip Pandey, who contested the 2019 general election, but lost.

Arvind Kejriwal remains the fiercest challenger of the BJP in Delhi. The AAP leader successfully rode out the Modi wave in 2015 and led his party to a thumping majority in the assembly poll, winning 67 of the 70 seats and cornering 54.3 per cent of the vote share.