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On AAP’s Kejriwal vs ‘Who’ barb, BJP’s Prakash Javdekar responds
The ‘Kejriwal vs who’ question was hurled again at Union Minister Prakash Javdekar, the BJP’s election incharge for Delhi.
Leaders of Aam Aadmi Party have frequently taken swipes at the Bharatiya Janata Party that aims to wrest control of the city government in national capital Delhi over its presumptive chief minister against Arvind Kejriwal.
The ‘Kejriwal vs who’ question was hurled again at Union Minister Prakash Javadekar, the BJP’s election incharge for Delhi.
“It will be Kejriwal vs the people,” Javadekar shot back during a Press conference that asked people to vote for the BJP because Delhi needed a ‘triple engine’.
Also Watch l ‘Don’t vote for your party, vote for Delhi’: Kejriwal’s message to voters
The BJP, which is in power at the Centre, had swept the 2017 civic body elections when it captured the three municipal corporations.
Javadekar, however, contended that the Arvind Kejriwal government had tried to slow down development projects - the expressways around Delhi and the metro expansion were two examples he gave - and the city should vote for the ruling party to smoothen the rough edges in governing the national capital.
The BJP had named Kiran Bedi as the face of its 2015 campaign but that strategy or the face didn’t help the party which ended up with just about 3 out of 70 assembly.
For next month’s elections, the BJP leadership doesn’t appear sure if it should adopt the same strategy again and name a CM face. Instead, there is a strong view that the BJP would stand a better chance if it were to design its campaign around the achievements of the central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that also plays a crucial role in the governance of Delhi.
“PM Modi’s leadership is well known in the country…. We will fight the election with full strength,” Javadekar explained at the briefing held minutes after the Election Commission announced that the national capital will vote on 8 February. The votes will be counted on 11 February.
Javadekar was also asked about Arvind Kejriwal’s one-line tweet after the election schedule was announced. In this, Kejriwal had underlined that his party would fight on the basis of the work that it had done in five years.
Javadekar said he agreed with Kejriwal on this.
“That is what we are saying too. It will be fought on the basis of work, not on promises and surely not on lies,” Javadekar said, delivering his counter-punch to the AAP boss.
Javadekar, who lashed out at AAP and the Congress for the violent protests in the city over amendments to the citizenship law, accused the Congress, AAP and Left parties of a role in Sunday’s violence at Jawaharlal Nehru University or JNU.
“We have condemned the violence,” the minister said, confident that the people who carried out the attacks would be “unmasked”.
An unspecified number of masked men, armed with sticks, rods and hammers, had stormed JNU on Sunday evening and attacked students as well as teachers. The JNU students’ union blamed the BJP-linked Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad for the attack.
