A contest the entire country will be tuned in to
With the Election Commission of India on Monday announcing the much-awaited date for the Assembly poll in Delhi, the political battle for the country’s capital-State has formally begun. While the three main contenders — the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party — will ostensibly be fighting to win the election, the real challenge for them is not one that they all share. The BJP, riding on its successive triumphs in the 2014 lok Sabha and the State Assembly elections in Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand, and a strong showing in Jammu & Kashmir, will seek to continue this winning streak.
Delhi is, after all, the country’s political heart where the Union Government is situated, and it would be an embarrassment for the ruling party at the Centre to lose this State. A victory in Delhi will be a fitting start to the BJP in the New Year. On the other hand, the AAP is fighting for relevance. Having ruled the State for 49 days following a surprise good showing in the last Assembly election, but then messing up the chance, it is desperate to make the point that it is serious about governance. Also, it could not sustain its victory across the country, with a vast number of its candidates losing their deposits in the lok Sabha election and its chief Arvind Kejriwal going down in Varanasi against Mr Narendra Modi.
If the AAP does not do well this time around in Delhi, it will have nowhere to look for its resurgence. Delhi is its world — and the only hope for the party to revive its fortunes and lost credibility. On the other hand, the Congress is, frankly speaking, fighting neither for victory nor relevance. It is simply battling for survival in a State over which it had lorded for more than a decade at a stretch until 2013. It had ended up with a mere eight seats in the last Assembly election and is staring at a repeat or worse performance. That it has been pushed to the fringe became evident from the recent statement of former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit that the party could support the AAP in Government-formation in case the electorate throws up a hung verdict. Thus, the battle for Delhi is between the BJP and the AAP, with the Congress not even in a position to be a spoiler.
That being the case, it is not surprising that leaders of the two dominant parties have been targeting each other, directly or indirectly, to win the voters’ affection. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s barbs at Mr Kejriwal for his failure to govern and having “mastery” over disruptive tactics — during his recent public rally at Ramlila Maidan — and the AAP leader’s quick response that he knew how to both govern and agitate, are part of that game. In the last Assembly election too, both the AAP and the BJP had been forerunners, with the Congress sinking under the burden of the ineffective performance of the Congress-led Union Government and the perceived acts of omission and commission of the then regime headed by Ms Dikshit in Delhi. However, the difference this time is that the AAP is now a known entity — it has a none-too-credible baggage. To that extent, the party is at a disadvantage. The question is: How effectively will the BJP be able to exploit the chink in the AAP’s armour, and use the vibrant-as-ever Modi factor in the weeks leading to the electionIJ