By Sushil Kutty
Pre-poll ablutions for the Delhi assembly elections are in full swing with the Aam Aadmi Party first off the block along with Delhi’s YouTubers and social media influencers who aren’t consuming the aftermath of the Maharashtra assembly elections, the Winter Session of Parliament and the brouhaha over the Constitution and Soros-Adani, giving AAP convener and ousted Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal a clear field to showcase his election-winning prowess and fight from being reduced to an also-ran after spending time behind bars in Delhi’s high-security Tihar Jail.
Then to be replaced by Atishi! A trusted lieutenant and minister under Kejriwal, Atishi wasn’t in Kejriwal’s wildest nightmares. The former Delhi Chief Minister’s resume now carries the black mark ‘jailbird’, a period of incarceration when Kejriwal’s wife, Sunitha, got the chance to get a taste of power that politicians crave for. But then, Kejriwal got bail and Sunitha Kejriwal went back to housekeeping.
Kejriwal & family also lost the Chief Minister’s official residence along with its opulence – toilets of gold with the climate-controlled bowl. Now, Kejriwal has taken things in hand and is refusing to play second fiddle to anybody in AAP including Chief Minister Atishi, who gave up her surname ‘Marlena’ upon becoming CM. With AAP jumping the gun, it is more than apparent that if anybody calls the shots in AAP, it is Arvind Kejriwal and nobody else.
And Kejriwal is not redesigning himself or the AAP for the election. The party is sticking to “freebies” and “auto-drivers” for victory. From the looks of it, if AAP returns to power with another sweeping mandate, lots of auto drivers would be getting their daughters married off because Kejriwal announced five guarantees for auto drivers – among them Rs 1 lakh for the marriage of their marriage-eligible daughters along with Rs 10 lakh life insurance.
That’s more money than what auto drivers can save in 20 years. Kejriwal’s dependence on “freebies” has only increased since being jailed in the Delhi liquor excise scam. The charges might vanish if Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) romp home in style. For now, it is fingers crossed and hoping that voters have forgotten what negatives Kejriwal and the AAP are capable of when in power.
The final list of 38 AAP candidates was out on Sunday and includes that of Arvind Kejriwal and Chief Minister Atishi, both of whom are sticking to their home-turfs, Kejriwal from New Delhi and Atishi from Kalkaji. Ousted Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia fled familiar hunting ground Patparganj and skipped across the Yamuna to the Jungpura assembly constituency, where voters are not happy having in their midst the once ‘World’s Best Education Minister’.
The Congress party, which is nowhere in the hunt, has decided to field the late Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s son Sandeep Dikshit from the New Delhi assembly constituency and it can be assured and assumed that the BJP wouldn’t settle for a minnow, guaranteeing that Kejriwal wouldn’t get a walkover, which could have been if not for the ‘jailbird’ tag. But Arvind Kejriwal is peculiar and people like the quirky in their choice of politician.
Don’t forget Arvind Kejriwal was not voted to power again and again because of his good looks or charisma. Arvind took home the trophy because he climbed up lamp-poles and slept on the road outside the Rail Bhavan. Kejriwal was also the first politician to take on Narendra Modi from the Varanasi parliamentary constituency and went on to defame a clutch of Modi’s cabinet ministers including the late Arun Jaitley.
Kejriwal has called Prime Minister Narendra Modi every unholy name in the book and Kejriwal’s urge to replace Narendra Modi in 7, Lok Kalyan Marg isn’t disguised. If nobody has yet written a book on ‘Kejriwal In Tihar’, it must be because Kejriwal’s ‘Buy One, Take Two’ scheme stopped without a hangover! Only a drunk can visualize Kejriwal in the Tihar cell.
Arvind Kejriwal’s faith in freebies remains because Kejriwal knows his women vote-bank and he also knows his men vote-bank, those yearning for the extra-large one, which was Kejriwal’s most-popular freebie. Above the cacophony of the slowly building up electioneering, one can hear the nostalgia of the good old days when there was endless drinking. If liquor brought Kejriwal down, liquor has in it’s spirit to take him to the top, again!
Never underestimate the power of déjà vu. Kejriwal is an enticement people want to court. And he is in complete control of the Aam Aadmi Party. Ticket distribution went off without a bump or a hitch. There was no bickering. The only challenger left, the transport minister, took the first bus out, with bag and baggage, leaving Kejriwal in the driver’s seat, unchallenged.
Another Kejriwal favourite Saurabh Bharadwaj will contest from Greater Kailash and yet another close cohort Gopal Rai will fight from Babarpur. Manish Sisodia, the original Kejriwal loyalist, will contest from uphill Jangpura. AAP is up against a 10-year anti-incumbency and a number of MLAs have been replaced. What stands out is the “no-alliance with the Congress” declaration, signally that the INDI-Alliance will never change its spots.
Kejriwal is against a pre-poll truck with the Indian National Congress. AAP will fight the election on its own strength. Other familiar names include that of Satyendra Kumar Jain from Shakur Basti, Durgesh Pathak from Rajinder Nagar and Sanjeev Jha from Burari. Kejriwal might face in addition to Sandeep Dikshit, Parvesh Sahib Singh, who also is a son of an ex-Chief Minister of Delhi.
The AAP final list had the names of 38 candidates. But for all of the first off the block achievements, AAP will not have it easygoing. Kejriwal has been New Delhi MLA since 2014 and this time will be his most challenging. The New Delhi constituency has the biggest single block of educated voters, those who have not forgotten Kejriwal’s under the table urges.
Among them thousands who were Kejriwal’s fellow-travellers when he himself was a government employee. After the release of AAP’s final list, Kejriwal quipped on ‘X’: “BJP is missing. They have no CM face, no team, no planning and no vision for Delhi. They have only one slogan, only one policy and only one mission – ‘Remove Kejriwal.”
But Kejriwal should start worrying. Voters now have the option of weighing both the positives and the negatives in Arvind Kejriwal. And fielding Amanatullah Khan from Okhla will get AAP an assured seat, but fielding a person of Amanatullah’s reputation will produce anti-Amanatullah ripples across Delhi, wherever alleged Rohingya and Bangladeshi infiltrators are believed to have built lives.
The Delhi Police are currently on a detect-illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya drive, checking Aadhar cards and the address-histories of these people living in Delhi’s slums and ghettos, the policemen mightily nervous themselves, because these are the same cops who had been giving protection to such rackets. The drive ordered by the Delhi Lt. Guv is not a Delhi Govt initiative.
It is the Union Home Ministry’s directive and it directly buoys up the BJP’s ‘ghuspetiya’ election plank, which failed to deliver Jharkhand to the BJP. But Delhi is the nation’s capital and from the videos uploaded by scores of YouTubers, it can be seen and heard that Delhi’s pale underbelly is riven with the shady and the shoddy, the latter the men in uniform whose job it was to patrol and keep Delhi free of the shady.
The BJP and the Lt. Guv will forget Bangladeshi and Rohingya once the elections are over. For now, tens of thousands of “undetected people” are being checked and their lives put through the X-ray, some of the alleged illegal aliens belligerent and uncompromising, insisting they are Indians and can prove it with Aadhar and Election Card!
The AAP, Arvind Kejriwal, and Okhla’s Amanatullah stand firm with this “electorate” and the AAP has gone ahead and registered complaints with the Election Commission, alleging that the BJP was busy filing applications asking for the deletion of the names of lakhs of voters from the voters’ list of several constituencies.
All this, when Kejriwal announced that the women of Delhi will get Rs 1,000 per month after the AAP forms the new government but that the women should start registering their names straightaway and that because there’s inflation, the honorarium will be hiked to Rs 2,100 per month after the AAP wins this election. “Start registration from tomorrow itself… The revised amount will help the women of Delhi,” the master of freebies said with his usual smile. (IPA Service)
The post Arvind Kejriwal is Upbeat on Delhi Assembly Elections appeared first on Daily Excelsior.