Election results: BJP, AAP prepare for govt formation, Congress sulks

Some leaders from the 'Group of 23' of Congress that had questioned the party leadership met at the residence of Ghulam Nabi Azad

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) celebrated, the Congress wrung its hands, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) launched the next phase of the election campaign for Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh on the day after the results of elections to five states were declared.

Bhagwant Mann of the AAP will take oath as the chief minister of Punjab on March 16 at Khatkar Kalan, the ancestral village of iconic freedom fighter Bhagat Singh in Nawanshahar, after he met the party’s national convenor Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi.

On March 13, the party will hold a roadshow in Amritsar. Both events will be attended by Kejriwal. Mann’s meeting with Kejriwal — also attended by Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and AAP in-charge of political affairs in Punjab Raghav Chadha — went on for more than an hour.

“My younger brother Bhagwant Mann will take oath as the chief minister of Punjab. Today he came to my house to extend an invitation for the oath-taking ceremony. I am sure that as a chief minister, Bhagwant will fulfil every expectation of the people of Punjab,” Kejriwal tweeted in Hindi.

The AAP won in 92 of the 117 Assembly seats. Mann won from the Dhuri seat by a huge margin of 58,206 votes.

However, the AAP was in the cross-hairs of the BJP almost immediately. Union Minister Smriti Irani charged that AAP had prevented funds from reaching the (BJP-run) municipal organisations in Delhi and community centres as well as health facilities were denied funding. 

The municipal elections were due in April but have now been deferred indefinitely, with suggestions that the organisation of these bodies could be tweaked by the Centre.

Delhi is a Union Territory governed by the central government through a Lieutenant Governor. Full statehood for Delhi is expected to become a big campaigning point. By contrast, the Congress sulked and PCC chief Navjot Sidhu took solace from the fact that he might have lost but his detractors in the party lost by even bigger margins.

“People who dug holes for Sidhu got buried in holes 10 feet deeper. Let bygones be bygones... People have voted for the AAP for a change, I congratulate them. New seeds have to be sown. Not ‘chinta’ but ‘chintan’ should be done,” Sidhu said. 

Even before party chief Sonia Gandhi could call for a meeting of the Congress Working Committee to discuss the outcome of the elections, some members of the ginger group in the party, the Group of 23, held a meeting at the residence of Ghulam Nabi Azad, who is also the former leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. Azad’s acceptance of a Padma award recently was criticised by some members of the Congress MPs Anand Sharma, Kapil Sibal, and Manish Tewari met at Azad’s residence. When asked for the reasons for the defeat of the Congress in Punjab, Tewari said: “Ask Rahul Gandhi.”

The BJP, meanwhile, pondered on the problem of finding a chief minister for Uttarakhand where the party has won a majority but its outgoing chief minister, Pushkar Dhami, has lost. Although the BJP has named chief minister designates in all other states where it expected to form a government — Yogi Adityanath in UP, Pramod Sawant in Goa, and N Biren Singh in Manipur — Dhami’s defeat has come as a setback in a state where the BJP won 47 of 70 seats.

BJP sources said the party will not repeat the fiasco it faced earlier of appointing Tirath Singh Rawat as chief minister, (before Dhami) and being unable to make him a member of the Legislative Assembly within the stipulated six-month period, and will choose someone from among the elected MLAs. Satpal Maharaj and Dhan Singh Rawat, who were ministers in the outgoing government, could be among the candidates. There will, however, be no imports from either the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha. Union Minister of State for Defence Ajay Bhatt could have been a candidate, as also Rajya Sabha MP Anil Baluni. However, that has now been ruled out.

“There is always the possibility that the central leadership may spring a surprise by making someone else the chief minister instead of the political heavyweights whose names are doing the rounds,” a party leader said.