BJP prepares to outmanouver AAP in Modi's 'home state'

Elections to the Delhi assembly are imminent in the next couple of months

For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), winning the Delhi Assembly election is deemed essential, as it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘home state’ and losing it is likely to provide impetus to forces opposing it.

Elections to the Delhi Assembly are imminent. The BJP has rolled out an extensive plan to outmanoeuvre the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), both in propaganda and in trying to woo that party’s Dalit vote base.

BJP President Amit Shah held a meeting with the Delhi BJP unit on Tuesday to discuss how the party will utilise the presence of all its 320-odd Members of Parliament (MPs) during their stay in Delhi for the Winter session of Parliament. There will be no relaxed evenings for its MPs after a hard day’s work. Members of both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha will be asked to hold at least three meetings in a ward each week between 6 pm and 10 pm from December 1 to 20.

The undivided Municipal Corporation of Delhi had 272 civic wards. This means at least 2,500 roadside meetings a week. Wards would be divided among the MPs based on their demographics, so that the party reaches out to all linguistic communities.

The message to its MPs will be that Delhi — since it was where the PM now resides — is Modi’s “home state” (note that the city is actually a Union Territory) rather than either Uttar Pradesh, from where he is a Lok Sabha MP, or even Gujarat. And, the MPs should contribute to ensure that the party is victorious here.

The BJP city unit has also launched 72 prakoshtha or cells — for Sikhs, Sindhis, south Indians, doctors, lawyers, etc — for outreach to all castes, linguistic communities and professional groups.

A feature of the campaign is to build on the PM’s Swachh Bharat campaign to reach out to Dalit communities. The community, one-fourth of Delhi’s electorate, had supported the AAP in the December 2013 Assembly elections. The BJP has dedicated teams to engage with community associations like dhobi samaj, nai samaj, blacksmiths, etc.

That Shah has taken charge of election planning in Delhi is also likely to help resolve the perennial Punjabi versus Purabiya (Eastern UP and Bihar) friction. Some in the party believe it didn’t perform as well as it should have in the 2013 Assembly elections because of poor candidate selection, while 40 of AAP’s 70 candidates were from UP and Bihar which reflected Delhi’s demographic change of the past two decades.

Adding to AAP’s troubles would be the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The party is keen to put up a better contest to regain its Dalit vote base in Delhi. BSP had secured a handsome 14 per cent vote share in the 2008 Assembly elections which dropped to five per cent in 2013, with the emergence of the AAP. BJP had won all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi in the 2014 general elections, with a vote share of about 45 per cent.