Breaking away from the conventional way of releasing its manifesto, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Wednesday launched the ‘Delhi Dialogue’ campaign to prepare a 50-point blueprint of the Capital’s development plan for the next five years. According to senior leaders of the party, the blueprint will be prepared after taking opinion from residents on how their ideal city should be. Senior party member Yogendra Yadav said that this would help give people time to gauge their work plan and also initiate a viable way of coming out with a workable action plan.
“There are a variety of people that reside in Delhi. We want to know what kind of a city a student, housewife, working woman, villager, farmer, businessman, senior citizen or labourer in Delhi wants. We have been talking to all kinds of people to know how they see their city and have made a 50-point blueprint which contains solely what the citizens of Delhi want. We will hold the first dialogue at Jantar Mantar on Saturday,” said party convener Arvind Kejriwal.
The Delhi Dialogue will look at different sectors of governance individually and address issues based on research and feedback. Sectors like energy, water, sanitation, education, health, trade and transport will be discussed.” The team that will manage this campaign consists of Ashish Khetan, Adarsh Shastri, Preeti Sharma Menon and Meera Sanyal. “This campaign aims at bringing down the artificial wall between those governing and those being governed. We will speak to global citizens, experts and the public and use the inputs for effective governance,” said Khetan.
According to Yadav, while this campaign will present every piece of the puzzle in a straight forward way and initiate conversation, it will also put pressure on other parties. “The blueprint we present will not only be for the sake of showing our manifesto but for our own use when the AAP forms the Government. It will be AAP’s governance plan for the next five years,” he said. The AAP will hold another campaign on November 26, which is the party’s foundation day, where issues related to women’s safety will be addressed.
Meanwhile, Yadav said that their fight was only with BJP in this Assembly election and the corrupt systems in Delhi. “We are fighting against the corrupt system and whoever comes in that is our rival too. We are not the kinds who will criticise each and everything the Government does,” he said. The party will be releasing the first list of names of candidates standing in the Assembly elections from the various constituencies in the coming one or two days.