New Delhi: Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal filed his nomination papers from New Delhi constituency for the upcoming Delhi Assembly Election 2013 on Saturday. Kejriwal said that the countdown for the end of Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s 15-year “misrule” has begun. Kejriwal contended that the December 4 poll would bring the curtains down on Congress rule in Delhi. “This is an election for the people of Delhi and they will fight it,” he added.
Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Thursday filed her nomination papers from New Delhi Assembly constituency. Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) chief ministerial nominee, Harsh Vardhan, also filed his nomination papers for Krishna Nagar constituency on the same day. For the first time, Delhi will see a three-way contest in Assembly elections, thanks to a political party that is only 11 months old but is already making waves. The entry of the AAP in the November battle has for all practical purposes ended what was essentially a bi-polar nature of Delhi’s electoral scene: the Congress vs the BJP. Although the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party are dismissive of the AAP’s claims of an outright victory, their leaders admit that the AAP is bound to hurt them.
Both fans and critics credit all this to AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal, a mechanical engineer from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur) and an Indian Revenue Service officer who was a big boss in the Income Tax department before he turned activist before various causes before he finally decided he needed a political party to overhaul the system. Born as a result of the anti-corruption campaign of Gandhian Anna Hazare that gripped Delhi two years ago, AAP was founded in November 2012, and it got its election symbol — a broom (to symbolically sweep the system clean) — only this year. The AAP is widely discussed in the capital even if not everyone is willing to accept Kejriwal’s claim that he will form the next government. In just a year, the AAP has around 12,000 registered supporters — 4,000 of them students including 400 from IIT Delhi — and 150,000 “prabharis”, each tasked with overseeing 20 families in his neighborhood.
Bureau Report
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