The BJP’s Ramesh Bidhuri, the Congress’ Vijender Singh and the Aam Aadmi Party’s Raghav Chadha are locked in a triangular political battle for South Delhi, which will vote in the sixth phase of Lok Sabha elections on May 12 with six other seats of the national capital .
While BJP’s Bidhuri, 57, sitting MP and three-time MLA, started politics with his student days, Congress’s Vijender Singh, 33, is a recent entrant. A professional boxer, he is a Jat from Bhiwani in Haryana who lives in Shanti Kunj in Vasant Kunj.
The AAP’s Raghav Chadha, 31, is a chartered accountant. An upper caste Punjabi, he grew up in New Rajender Nagar but now lives in Saket.
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Plush farmhouses, barren lands, vast rural belt, the planned neighbourhoods such as Saket and Vasant Kunj and the congested unauthorised colonies in Sangam Vihar and Palam reflect the wide variety in demography and topography of South Delhi constituency.
In 2008, when delimitation was carried out for Delhi’s parliamentary constituencies, all assembly segments in erstwhile South Delhi, except Kalkaji, went to the current Lok Sabha segments of New Delhi, East Delhi and the newly formed West Delhi. The assembly constituencies that the old South Delhi seat had to part with include Janakpuri, Tilak Nagar, Hari Nagar, Rajouri Garden, Delhi Cantonment, R K Puram, Hauz Khas, Malviya Nagar and Okhla.
{{/usCountry}}In 2008, when delimitation was carried out for Delhi’s parliamentary constituencies, all assembly segments in erstwhile South Delhi, except Kalkaji, went to the current Lok Sabha segments of New Delhi, East Delhi and the newly formed West Delhi. The assembly constituencies that the old South Delhi seat had to part with include Janakpuri, Tilak Nagar, Hari Nagar, Rajouri Garden, Delhi Cantonment, R K Puram, Hauz Khas, Malviya Nagar and Okhla.
{{/usCountry}}Meanwhile, Outer Delhi, which used to be the biggest Lok Sabha constituency in the national capital with as many as 21 assembly segments, was obliterated. A large part of what used to be Outer Delhi once makes South Delhi today. It gave South Delhi, the assembly segments of Palam, Bijwasan, Mehrauli, Chhatarpur, Deoli, Ambedkar Nagar, Sangam Vihar, Tughlakabad and Badarpur.
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On vote share matrix Gujjars, Jats and Purvanchalis are the major players. Together, according to the numbers pegged by the political parties, the three communities make almost one-third of the total voting population in South Delhi. And in this Jat-Gujjar-Purvanchali mix, the Purvanchalis form one half, and the Gujjars and Jats taken together form another.
Delimitation and immigration have affected vote bases in many ways. For instance, several villages in Chhatarpur and Badarpur have transformed from Gujjar-dominated villages to Purvanchali-dominated pockets. Some have resulted in the formation of urbanised slums such as Aya Nagar and Palam Village. The biggest unauthorised colony in Delhi such as Sangam Vihar are now a melting pot of identities.
Understandably civic and infrastructure issues form the basis of the poll campaigns of three main contestants with AAP putting stress on full statehood for Delhi.
In 2014 Lok Sabha elections, BJP’s Bidhuri had defeated AAP’s Devinder Sehrawat with 1.06 lakh votes.
On May 12, the constituency’s nearly 21 lakh voters are expected to exercise their franchise to pick their representative from the seat that has in the past been represented by BJP’s Sushma Swaraj, Madanlal Khurana, Vijay Kumar Malhotra and Congress’s Arjun Singh.