Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Dec 27: In a major success for the Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party, it ended ahead of the BJP in the elections to the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation though the party was still short of five seats for a clear majority in the 35-member civic body of the capital city of two states, Punjab and Haryana.
The outcome of the Chandigarh municipal corporation elections declared on Monday has come as a big boost for the AAP as it was the first time the party had entered the civic elections in Chandigarh which traditionally saw rivalries between the BJP and the Congress. The Punjab state Assembly is scheduled to go to the polls in the next couple of months and the AAP has already announced its decision to set up candidates for all the seats substantially damaging the prospects of the ruling Congress.
While the AAP ended with 14 seats, the BJP which was ruling the CMC finished second with 12 seats while the Congress, which had only four seats last time, won eight and the Akali Dal remained at one. In the last elections, the BJP had won a massive 21 seats when the total strength of the House was only 26, which has gone up to 35 after the delimitation this time. The BJP’s mayor was among the losers in the elections though the party had thrown into the ring a number of party bigwigs for campaign besides seeking votes in the name of prime minister Narendra Modi since Chandigarh as a union territory is administered by the centre. In a huge setback for the BJP, its mayor Ravi Kant Sharma and former mayor Davesh Moudgil were both defeated by AAP candidates. AAP’s election campaign committee head Chander Mukhi Sharma also lost.
“Only final results will show which party’s vote base has shifted to AAP because BJP’s voters never shift their loyalty,” said Naresh Arora, BJP’s Chandigarh spokesperson.
The political observers believe that coming soon after the party’s rout in the elections to the Kolkata municipal corporation last week, the BJP’s appeal to the urban voters seem to be waning.
The tally also shows that parties failed to gauge the silent mood in favour of change. The BJP, in particular, miscalculated by centring its campaign around the theme of Hindutva, with Jai Shri Ram slogans and references to Ayodhya temple peppering its campaign. Till the very end, senior leaders were upbeat, asserting that the ruling party at the Centre always had an edge in the Chandigarh civic poll elections. The BJP even had packets of sweets ready in offices.
Kejriwal said the civic poll results were “a sign of the coming change in Punjab”. “People of Chandigarh today have chosen honest politics of AAP, rejecting corrupt politics.”
“AAP’s victory in the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation points at imminent change in Punjab. People have rejected corrupt politics and have chosen AAP…Punjab is ready for change,” tweeted Kejriwal. The Delhi Chief Minister has been campaigning aggressively for the Punjab election. “The Chandigarh election is a trailer, Punjab will be the full movie. The mood in Chandigarh is the mood in Punjab,” added AAP’s Raghav Chadha.
The AAP’s good show in Chandigarh comes even as the BJP earlier in the day formally announced its alliances with former Congress chief minister Amarinder Singh’s new party Punjab Lok Congress and Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa’ s Sanyukt Akali Dal. Both Singh and Dhindsa, a Rajya Sabha member, held a meeting with the BJP’s top brass, including he national president JP Nadda and the union home minister Amit Shah in Delhi to chalk out the election strategy.
Addressing the media after the meeting, former union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said, “Today, it is being officially announced that the three parties would jointly contest the upcoming Assembly polls in Punjab.” Shekhawat, the BJP’s poll in-charge for Punjab, said to finalise the seat sharing agreement, a joint committee would be formed comprising two leaders from each party. He also announced that the three-party alliance would come up with a joint manifesto.
