AAP STARTS NEW CAMPAIGN OVER ‘TERRORIST CM’ REMARK

NEW DELHI: With about 10,000 posters printed overnight and more than a million pamphlets likely to arrive in a day, the AAP Friday launched a new campaign to take on the BJP over MP Parvesh Verma’s remark that chief minister Arvind Kejriwal is a “terrorist”.

The counter campaign, launched just a week before assembly polls on February 8, is a digression from the party’s core campaign that, so far, focussed on development and welfare issues.

On Friday, AAP supporters marched through the lanes of west Delhi’s Dashrathpuri but they did not chant the party’s poll slogan, “Achhe Beetein Paanch Saal, Lagey Raho Kejriwal (The past five years have gone well, carry on Kejriwal)”.

Instead, they waved placards with slogans such as “Kejriwal is our son, not a terrorist”, “Kejriwal is our brother, not a terrorist” and “We are the common people of Delhi, not terrorists”.

Such campaigns were seen across all 70 constituencies Friday.

AAP’s Rajya Sabha MP and election campaign in-charge Sanjay Singh said, “We have not digressed from our core campaign. This is rather a special campaign within the macro campaign, which will continue across all constituencies till Sunday.”

Kejriwal’s core campaign and new campaign, both have been designed by campaign strategist Prashant Kishor’s I-PAC, which teamed with AAP last year.

In his response to the AAP’s new campaign, Verma said, “Kejriwal himself has used words such as terrorist for the Prime Minister and now he is crying victim. On February 8, the people of Delhi will tell him what they think of him.”

Praveen Rai, political scientist, Centre for Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, said the new campaign is a smart move by AAP.