Never before Delhi assembly polls have generated so much suspense and evoked so much interest as the upcoming one on Feb. 7. Never before Delhi has witnessed a pronounced three-horse race as it is going to have this time.
Also, never before the 130-year-old Congress party is going into the elections as a down-and-out political challenger as it is doing now, ceding much of its erstwhile political space to a two-year-old political outfit, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
In the long list of many firsts in the upcoming Delhi elections, perhaps the most notable first is that for the first time two prominent social activist-turned-politicians are locked in a seemingly evenly poised battle for the post of chief minister. They are AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal and former top cop Kiran Bedi, who was inducted into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Jan. 15 and just four days later was anointed as the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate.
The BJP has played a high stake gamble in parachuting Bedi into the party and making her lord over scores of leaders who have given their lifetime in service of the party. Bedi, the country’s first woman police officer, has always been autocratic and a “My way or the highway” kind of person with oodles of combustible ambition. She has never been known as a team person.
The foisting of Bedi on the Delhi unit of BJP has already had repercussions. She exhibited her dictatorial ways on Sunday when an “invitation” was sent by the party on her behalf to all Delhi BJP leaders, including union ministers and MPs at attend a tea party at her residence. Three of the seven BJP MPs did not attend the tea party.
One of them, Dr. Harshwardhan, a Cabinet minister in the Modi government and the BJP’s declared chief ministerial candidate in the 2013 Delhi polls, telephoned her that he had prior commitments but would be attending, though a bit late. By the time he reached her residence, she had already gone out without bothering to inform him.
Team Modi has already annoyed senior leaders of Delhi BJP by parachuting Bedi into the party and making her the chief ministerial candidate. This is not the way to win elections. Leaders cannot win elections on their own steam without the support of party colleagues and cadres.
The catapulting of Bedi on the Delhi poll pitch has electrified the Feb. 7 elections. The results will be out by the afternoon of Feb. 10 but here is a sneak peek into the likely outcome for the three major parties — BJP, AAP and Congress.
If BJP wins, it will be a continuum of the dream run for Modi and his Man Friday Amit Shah, the BJP president. Bedi would just be seen as yet another satellite in the Modi solar system. But if the BJP loses the elections and fails to get even 32 seats in the 70-member assembly like in the 2013 polls, the Modi-Shah team would just shrug it off, lay all the blame at Bedi’s door and say to the world that it was an experiment that failed.
For AAP, it is a matter of its very survival. The party is desperately trying to reinvent and regroup itself. Even if it repeats its past performance of 28 seats, it will be highly creditable for the party. AAP has put a deep focus on Delhi and taken a conscious decision of not contesting elections to four states in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir last year despite the fact that it has a strong base in the first two. Defeat in Delhi polls would be highly demoralizing for the party and could even put a serious question mark on its survival.
Congress is perhaps the only party, which would have the least at stake. Victory seems out of question for the Congress as all opinion polls and election surveys have put the party at a poor third. Yet, ironically the performance of the Congress will determine the results. The infighting-hit party is getting into the elections with a new face Ajay Maken, though he has not been formally declared as a chief ministerial candidate. This in itself explains quite a lot. The grand old party does not even entertain visions of winning the elections.
Everything will depend on the performance of the Congress party. Last time, it had managed to win just eight seats as AAP had eaten into its vote share in a big way. If Congress improves its performance and takes its tally to 15 or more, it would largely be at the expense of AAP. However, if the Congress vote share were to fall further it won’t be good news for the BJP as the likely beneficiary of such a scenario will be AAP, not BJP.
For the next fortnight much will depend on how Bedi performs. She has already somewhat ceded moral ground to AAP by declining Kejriwal’s challenge for a US Presidential type debate.
