The coming Delhi election

Amitava Mukherjee

(Amitava Mukherjee is a senior journalist and commentator. He can be contacted at amitavamukherjee253@gmail.com)

The most serious problem that the BJP is facing on the eve of the coming Assembly election in Delhi is the uncomfortable truth that the party has no credible leadership in the state. It fought two previous elections putting forth HarshaVardhan, the incumbent Union Health Minister, as the chief ministerial candidate but in vain. Ground level reports suggest that Manoj Tewari, the present Delhi BJP chief, is way behind Arvind Kejriwal, the incumbent Chief Minister of Delhi from the Aam Admi Party (AAP), in popularity rating.

So the BJP in Delhi must now be ruing the absence of a Madan Lal Khurana and a Vijay Kumar Malhotra when opinion surveys are predicting a tough battle ahead of it. Both of them have died but have left lasting impressions on Delhi’s political chess board. In the 1960s and the early 1970s when very few people were prepared to give the former Jan Sangh much weight in the national political canvas, it was Madan Lal Khurana who used to give a press conference regularly in Delhi to keep his party stay afloat. Similarly old timers in Delhi still recollect Vijay Kumar Malhotra’s organizational contribution behind Jay Prakash Narayan’s massive meeting at the capital’s Ram Lila ground before the 1977 general election.

The coming Assembly election will test whether the BJP in Delhi still possesses that old thunder or whether the AAP can repeat the electoral magic it had displayed in 2015 or whether the Congress can rise up like a phoenix from the political ashes it has voluntarily drowned itself in. It is improper to predict any result at this stage in spite of the fact that some surveys have given the AAP handsome leads over the two other contestants. But one thing is certain that Arvind Kejriwal has taken lessons from the results of the last Lok Sabha election. Delhi voters have a propensity to segregate Assembly elections from parliamentary polls. Therefore, the AAP has refrained from joining in national issues like the NRC/CAA or criticizing the Prime Minister’s performance. Instead it is championing its ‘successes’ in the field of education and health, the two areas where the AAP government in Delhi is widely credited with doing well.

How important is this election? Delhi is basically a city state with only 70 Assembly seats and much of the constituencies here are smaller in terms of size and population than their counterparts in Punjab and Haryana. But from the BJP’s standpoint the election is highly important because it involves the personal prestige of not only NarendraModi but a host of other party leaders like Vijay Goel and HarshaVardhan some of whom have grown in their political lives through students’ politics in Delhi University. So if the BJP looses Delhi this time too, as it happened in 2015, it will be a major setback for the party after the Maharashtra and Jharkhand results.

Electoral dynamics of Delhi has a peculiarity. Unlike other states of the Hindi belt, caste does not play any significant role here. There are 25-30 per cent Purvanchalis (mostly people of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and to a much lesser extent those of West Bengal), 35 per cent Punjabis and around 15 per cent Muslims. Interestingly AAP’s socio political credo of catering to the needs of the lower middle class and the subalterns easily connects with the Purbanchalis from whom come most of the city’s transport sector workforce, workers of low end industrial units and those of the service sectors. But the BJP is trying hard to have a foothold among these voters. The 15 per cent Muslims are traditional Congress voters. But Congress in Delhi is in disarray and quite a few influential Muslim leaders have switched over to the AAP along with their local followers. An example is Shoib Iqbal, a highly influential Congress leader and a five-time Congress MLA of the city. He has left the Congress and is contesting from the Matia Mahal constituency as an AAP candidate.

The BJP has certainly taken note of the opinion polls which are putting the AAP ahead of the saffron party. A little peep into the electoral statistics will point out that the AAP has always thrived at the expense of the Congress. In the 2013 assembly election the AAP had got 29.49 per cent votes, BJP 33.07 per cent and the Congress 24.55 per cent. It resulted in an AAP-led shaky coalition government which crumbled soon. But in the 2015 Assembly poll AAP’s share of votes jumped to 54.34 per cent. The BJP could hold on to its electoral base by securing 32.19 per cent votes. But the Congress’ vote share had plummeted to a paltry 9.45 per cent. It was clear that the majority of the Congress voters had shifted their allegiance to the AAP.

With Congress still in a moribund state in Delhi there is very little reason to believe that its voters will find any encouragement to come back to its fold. With the election close at hand it may not be proper to highlight various opinion poll surveys. While the BJP will try to drag the whole electioneering process to a national canvass and highlight issues like nationalism, national security etc, the AAP’s endeavour will be to focus on local issues. But for all the parties the stake will be very high.

For the AAP it is a question of existential survival. For the BJP it is a matter of prestige and expectation. For the Congress a good performance in Delhi will provide it with the much needed oxygen after its satisfactory performance in Maharashtra and Jharkhand.