Flinging headlong into campaign mode for the Assembly elections in Delhi which are due in early 2020, the Aam Aadmi Party has attempted to corner the rival Bharatiya Janata Party on the question of who will be its chief ministerial face to take on the AAP's Arvind Kejriwal.
AAP's Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh has written a politically loaded letter to Vijay Goel, one of the BJP's most prominent leaders in the national capital, posing to him three questions which deal with the saffron party's response to the Kejriwal government's recently announced measures on relief to the people of Delhi with regard to electricity and water tariffs, and most importantly, the issue of who will Goel's party field as its chief ministerial candidate.
Through the letter, Singh has tried to put the focus on the internal tussle within the BJP on who would be its CM face as against clarity in the AAP on Kejriwal, the current chief minister, leading it in the election based on the slogan that he has delivered what he promised in 2015.
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“You have three claimants to the post of the chief minister. I was in a dilemma as to who should I address this letter to. However, since you are the seniormost and most experienced amongst the three, I am writing to you,” Singh said in his letter to Goel.
Goel is a long-timer in Delhi BJP and has represented the capital in the Lok Sabha. But his chief ministerial ambitions have never been achieved. The party chose Harsh Vardhan over him in the Assembly elections in 2014. And in 2015, it brought in Kiran Bedi to take on Kejriwal. And now, Goel is learnt to be competing against Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari and Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Vijender Gupta to be declared as the party's face for the state elections.
“There are so many battles going on between BJP leaders for the post of the chief minister that these people are not able to decide who will run which programme. In the race to take credit, BJP leaders are constantly working against the people of Delhi,” Singh told reporters.
In 2015 too, as the BJP delayed a decision on who would be its chief ministerial candidate, the AAP had repeatedly asked it to make it clear to the electorate as to who its CM face was. A harried BJP had then brought in top cop-turned-activist Kiran Bedi as its face for the polls. The party had hoped that Bedi, who was an associate-turned-rival of Kejriwal in the anti-corruption movement, would offer a tough fight to him. However, as the results of the elections proved, the strategy failed miserably and the AAP won an unimaginable 67 out of 70 seats.
Meanwhile, the AAP, by posing such questions to the local unit of the BJP and focusing on its local leadership, is also trying to ensure that the Delhi elections do not end up as a Modi vs. Kejriwal fight. This also explains the change in the stance of Kejriwal concerning the central government, with the chief minister going noticeably soft on the Centre as against his earlier acerbic attacks on the Modi regime.