It’s A Wrap! Ball Is Now In Voters’ Court

New Delhi: A high-octane campaign for a high-stakes election in the capital ended at 5pm on Monday. The ruling AAP is fighting a battle for survival with BJP, which has been out of power in Delhi for 26 years, pulling all stops and showing that it means business. AAP's INDIA bloc partner, Congress, too has been relentless in its attack on AAP, hoping to regain the ground it lost to Arvind Kejriwal's party.
With the loudspeakers now muted and no more promises to be made, it is left to the electorate to make an informed choice on Feb 5 to elect their representatives for the 70-member Delhi assembly.
The campaigning was not restricted to the conventional door-to-door contacts, public meetings and rallies, roadshows and phone calls. Social media and artificial intelligence were used extensively to create spoofs, memes and videos.
Though there are 699 candidates in the fray, the contest largely revolves around those of the three main players. AAP won the 2020 election with a 54% vote share and 62 seats while BJP got 38% votes and only eight seats in the 70-member house. Congress failed to open its account for the second time in succession and polled less than 5% votes.
Banking on its governance model of free welfare schemes, AAP remains confident of securing a third straight term in office. Its multi-layered campaign revolved around promoting the existing welfare schemes and hard-selling new guarantees announced by party supremo Arvind Kejriwal. While Kejriwal addressed nearly 40 rallies in the past 15 days, Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann participated in 49 roadshows and jan sabhas while Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh addressed about 70 public meetings.
The last leg of AAP's campaign was completely dedicated to highlighting the financial benefits the underprivileged were enjoying due to free electricity, water and transport for women in public buses.
The city's poor – those living in slums, resettlement colonies and unauthorised colonies – have been the biggest supporters of AAP and were partly responsible for its huge mandates in the last two elections. The party continues to rely heavily on their support but is not taking that for granted.
To woo this section of voters and others, the party announced an enhanced honorarium of Rs 2,100 for women, free treatment for senior citizens in state-run and private hospitals and financial assistance for priests of temples and gurdwaras besides other things. This, the party said, would provide an additional benefit of nearly Rs 10,000 a month to families.
BJP and Congress too have promised several financial incentives and AAP functionaries have been stressing at public meetings that their schemes will be stopped if their rivals win.
Taking the pitch many notches higher, AAP has accused the BJP govt in Haryana of "poisoning" the Yamuna that could kill a large number of people, inviting questions from the EC. AAP and BJP also clashed over the issue of alleged addition and deletion of votes, especially in the New Delhi constituency where Kejriwal is seeking a fourth consecutive win.
BJP, meanwhile, unleashed a blitzkrieg with its star campaigners, including chief ministers of Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Uttarakhand, several union ministers and MPs, collectively participating in 650 public meetings and roadshows in the past two weeks. Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed three election rallies while Union home minister Amit Shah made several appearances in different assembly constituencies.
Apart from popularising several announcements it made in its ‘Sankalp Patra' (election manifesto), BJP attacked AAP for alleged corruption and failure to carry out developmental work in the last few years. Though the party had earlier dismissed several "welfare schemes" run by the AAP govt as "free ki revadi" (freebies), it found it prudent not only to promise it would continue with those schemes but announced several of its own. With its ‘Mahila Samriddhi Yojana', BJP has promised to give a monthly honorarium of Rs 2,500 to women apart from increasing the pension of senior citizens, rolling out Ayushman Bharat healthcare scheme, giving small traders and entrepreneurs a monthly pension, promising a paid internship to the youth and gas cylinder at Rs 500 for the poor.
Congress started its campaign much before the elections with the state leadership taking out a ‘Nyay Yatra' across the city in Nov and Dec. For a change, the party announced the names of a few candidates much before the elections were announced, giving them enough time to campaign. AAP was singled out for a concerted attack. Though the campaign initially looked a little subdued, it picked up pace and created a buzz in the last few days with MPs Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi together making 15 appearances at public meetings and roadshows.
Congress upped the ante with the promise of Rs 8,500 per month for the unemployed for a year, Rs 2,500 a month for women under ‘Pyari Didi Yojana' and an insurance cover of Rs 25 lakh every year.