DELHI GOES TO POLLS TODAY
14.8M ELECTORS Polling to be held from 8am to 6pm across 13,751 booths CAPITAL CONTEST AAP seeks to retain power against BJP challenge
Officials carry EVMS on the eve of the 2020 Delhi assembly elections, at Akshardham Sports Complex in New Delhi on Friday. Poll authorities have geared up for the vote to the 70-member Delhi assembly on Saturday, making tight security arrangements, bringing an end to a bitterly fought high-octane election campaign.
NEWDELHI: After being witness to a fierce election campaign, nearly 14.5 million registered voters in Delhi will finally get an opportunity to vote on Saturday to choose representatives to 70 assembly segments across the national capital and decide who governs the city-state for the next five years.
In the first state elections of the new decade, whose outcome will be known on Tuesday, incumbent chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is seeking to retain power in the face of a strong challenge mounted by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has sought votes in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The Delhi elections have four distinct strands.
The first is the AAP’S attempt to replicate its success of the 2015 assembly election — when it won 67 of the 70 seats — versus the BJP’S effort to replicate its success in the 2019 Lok Sabha election,when it won all seven parliamentary seats in Delhi. The second is the AAP’S campaign, which is focused on local governance issues and its track record in the past five years versus the BJP’S, which focused on the larger ideological issue of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, national security, and an effort to project all protesters — and the AAP — as “anti-national”. The third is an effort by the AAP to carve out a multi-religious and multi-class alliance versus the BJP’S campaign to consolidate Hindu voters across regions, castes and classes. And the fourth is the question of leadership — where the CM is not pitted against a local rival but the PM.
Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has said the primary issue in the election will be the work done by his government, but hit out at the rival BJP for trying to change the discourse and make it “about a Hindu vs Muslim” issue. “Ours is the first government in 70 years that is seeking votes entirely on the ground of work done on the development front,” he told HT in an interview on Wednesday. People have to decide whether they “opt for the politics of abuse and violence, or politics of development”, he added.
Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari said his party’s agenda was development. “We are talking about Ayushman Bharat for free medical care and PM Awas Yojana to provide housing to people... Nonimplementation of these two schemes will be the main reason for AAP’S defeat in Delhi,” Tiwari told HT on Wednesday, adding that party did not endorse the provocative statements of some of its MPS.
Over the last four years, the city has voted distinctly for distinct elections.
During the 2015 elections, the AAP bagged 54% of the vote share in the polls. But its vote share decreased in the next two elections held in the city — the municipal elections in 2017 and the Lok Sabha polls in 2019. The AAP polled the highest share of votes in 2015; it stood second in the 2017 civic elections, with 26% of the votes, and finished third in five of the seven seats in the 2019 national elections, dropping to 18% of the votes and winning no seat.
On the contrary, both the BJP and the Congress improved in terms of vote share in this period. The BJP polled 56% votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, up from 36% in 2017 and 32% in 2015. In 2019, it had a lead in 65 of the 70 assembly constituencies. The Congress got just 10% of votes in 2015, 21% in 2017 and 23% in 2019.
Political observers believe that this election will significantly depend on whether voting patterns of the Lok Sabha election hold, or whether it reverts to the assembly pattern. A Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Csds)-lokniti poll conducted during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls showed that only about half of the people who voted for the BJP or the Congress in the Lok Sabha polls would have voted for the same party in case of a snap assembly election. The corresponding figure was 82% for the AAP.
The second variable is the impact of the campaign on the polls. The third related strand was mobilisation of different segments and the final strand is leadership.