Lok Sabha elections 2019: A fight for prestige in national Capital
The BJP swept the city-state in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls but if an alliance between the Congress and AAP is sealed, it might put up a tough fight for Delhi’s seven seats.
Will they or won’t they?
Over the past month, the Capital has been abuzz with rumours about negotiations between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Congress over a pact for the Lok Sabha election. But each time the speculation has reached a crescendo, it has been scotched, only for the reports of talks to gather steam again.
In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept all seven seats in the city with the AAP second and the Congress a distant third. But the combined vote share of the latter two outfits [32.9% (AAP) + 15.1% (Congress)] was slightly more of that of the saffron party, which got 46.4% votes.
The Congress is fighting its own dilemma. Delhi was a party bastion till 2013 when it was humiliatingly bundled out of office. The party that ruled the city for three consecutive terms lost its traditional bastions – slums, unauthorised colonies, Dalits and Muslims – to the AAP. Accepting a junior position in an alliance would mean accepting the setback as more or less permanent, and has brought to the fore deep divisions in the party with city unit chief Sheila Dikshit strongly opposed to a tie-up.
Delhi’s importance in the national polity outstrips its actual electoral heft. As the seat of government (and that of the national media), the city-state occupies a position of prestige during election season, and a victory can catapult a party or political leader on to the national stage -- take, for example, the AAP that gained a profile much larger than its Lok Sabha numbers or the size of the territory under its control, after a stunning debut in 2013, and a victory in 2015.
“The Congress-AAP alliance would have delivered good electoral gains. But in the long run, it would have further marginalised the party Congress] in the city’s electoral politics, just like in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar,” said Sanjay Kumar, director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS).
HIGH STAKES
In the summer of 2014, Kejriwal sprang a surprise. The engineer-turned-anti-corruption-crusader had just dissolved his government after a sensational debut. But instead of building the party back up, he decided to travel to Varanasi to challenge the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi.
Kejriwal lost, returned to Delhi – his party received a drubbing almost everywhere, except Punjab, and drew a blank in Delhi. But in assembly elections next year, AAP swept the Capital with 67 seats. The next four years were roiled by bruising fights with the Centre over administrative jurisdiction, and the disqualification of a clutch of party lawmakers that was later overturned.
With general elections looming, Kejriwal is no longer billing himself as a national alternative; instead his focus appears to be consolidating the AAP’s base, snatch Delhi’s seven Lok Sabha seats, and prepare the ground for city polls in nine months. The stakes for the AAP couldn’t be higher. It wants to cement its place in the party’s home and base, win a battle of prestige in the Capital, and maintain the party’s importance in Parliament, especially at a time when it looks unlikely to repeat its breakout performance of four seats in Punjab.
CAMPAIGN STRATEGY
The AAP’s has based its 2019 campaign on the issue of full statehood for Delhi, and started a door-to-door campaign on the issue on March 10.
At present, the services department, which deals with transfers, postings and performance reviews of officers in the Delhi government, lies with the Lieutenant Governor, who reports to the Union home ministry. According to Kejriwal, if Delhi is given the status of a full state, the elected government would have control over police, services and land.
The party is targeting both the BJP and Congress for promising statehood to Delhi in past election manifestos but not fulfilling it. The AAP has burnt the BJP’s 2014 general election manifesto for Delhi in every constituency in the past month because the document had promised to make Delhi a full state.
The BJP campaign, on the other hand, is not only highlighting the work done by the Modi government and for Delhi, but is also trying to woo voters from unauthorised colonies in the city. Nearly a third of Delhi’s population lives in unauthorised colonies and it is considered a strong vote bank of the AAP.
The BJP is using a Union Cabinet decision, passed in the second week of March, to convince people in these colonies that their houses will be regularised if the party is voted to power. The Cabinet constituted a special committee to devise a process to regularise the 1,797 unauthorised colonies in Delhi.
AAP’s Delhi unit convener Gopal Rai said the BJP’s defeat in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh was an indication that the “Modi wave” was waning. For Rai, a good show is important for the party to plan its expansion and also gain more independence in issues related to Delhi. “Most importantly, this election is crucial for us to strengthen governance in Delhi. It will not quite be a referendum on our performance because we are certain that AAP will come to power again in the 2020 state elections,” he said.
According to Rai, several Delhi-centric issues will dominate the elections. “Sealing has now become a big matter for Delhiites. The people who were affected by it, the business community, had been voting for the BJP and they are feeling cheated now,” he said. Rai said his party will highlight the development done by the Delhi government – especially in the field of education, water and electricity.
Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari dismissed the possibility of an AAP sweep and said his party will retain control of all seven seats. “Our vote share has remained intact (since 2013). Two years after we lost to AAP in the Delhi assembly, the BJP still won the municipal corporation elections (despite strong anti-incumbency as it was in power for two terms). This proves that the BJP enjoys people’s support,” he said.
The AAP, the ruling party in Delhi, managed to win only 48 of the 272 wards in the MCD elections held in April 2017 while the BJP won a third term with 181 wards. The BJP plans to run its campaign highlighting the achievements of the Modi government. “The Modi government has started a lot of citizen-centric schemes. One of our biggest achievements is that we have provided a corruption-free government to people. This time the contest is between Modi and corrupt gathbandhan (alliance),” said Tarun Chugh, national secretary and Delhi’s co-in-charge, BJP.
The Congress, which secured just 9.8% votes in the 2015 assembly polls,plans to talk about the work done during its 15-year tenure under former chief minister Dikshit. “What work have they done? Whatever has happened to Delhi (under AAP), is it better than what it was when we were there in power? We are going to focus on development. Whatever the AAP is talking about is all done by us. The Signature Bridge is our creation. Lots of flyovers you see [in the city] were started by us,” Dikshit said.
DEMOGRAPHICS
The BJP’s vote share has remained more or less intact since the 2013 assembly elections where the party got 31 seats with a 33.07% vote share. Even when the BJP was reduced to just three seats in 2015, its vote share (32.2%) dropped by just 0.87%.
If the AAP-Congress alliance is sealed, it could give the saffron party a tough fight on seats like New Delhi and Chandni Chowk (which have a sizable population of trader community) and North-east Delhi (which has the maximum number of Muslim-dominated areas and slum clusters). The opposition parties are already raking up the sealing drive and the BJP-led Centre’s inability to provide relief to traders.
The social composition of Delhi has changed over the years. While Baniyas and Punjabis continue to be a prominent votebank for the BJP, the Purvanchal community [people from eastern UP and western Bihar] has emerged as a game-changer. It is estimated that due to migration over the past decades, Purvanchalis now constitute nearly one-third of the city’s 20 million population.
The East Delhi parliamentary seat alone has 1.8 million voters in total, and plays a decisive role in 30-odd assembly seats. The BJP (Tiwari) and the AAP (Dilip Pandey, who is contesting from North East Delhi) have Purvanchali faces, but the Congress’s present city leadership doesn’t have many prominent Purvanchali representatives, save former MP from West Delhi, Mahabal Mishra.