In absence of CM candidate, Shah, Nadda take poll charge

Vibha Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 23

In absence of a chief ministerial candidate against incumbent Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president JP Nadda are leading the charge against him in Delhi.

Shah, who is slated to address multiple events in the run-up to the February 8 elections, today held as many three public programmes in Matiala, Uttam Nagar and Nagloi Jatt, giving steam and strength to the BJP plans.

Apart from exposing “failures” of the ruling AAP and local issues like “poor water quality”, the BJP is also raising national-level issues like the amended Citizenship Act and the violence over it along with strong decisions taken by the Narendra Modi government 2.0 like the abrogation of the special status to Jammu and Kashmir.

Sources say the BJP’s ideological fountainhead, the RSS, is lending additional support through small “drawing room” focusing on “nationalist issues”. Apart from public meetings and events, the saffron party has also activated overseas units in campaigning.

Notably, AAP’s NRI supporters played a major role in its performance in 2013 as well as in the 2015 Assembly elections. Meanwhile, Shah has held several “morale-boosting” meetings with local leaders, telling them that the 2020 situation was very different from 2015, when the BJP won just three of the 70 seats in the Delhi Assembly.

“Shah was then new to the Delhi politics, not as entrenched into it and its issues. Many of the decisions taken in the 2015 Assembly elections, including having a chief ministerial candidate, were taken at the behest of senior Central-level leaders from Delhi. It is a much different situation now and to think that the BJP will allow AAP to have a similar run in 2020 will be wrong. AAP leaders also know this and are believed to have warned cadres to not be complacent,” observers say.

Meanwhile, the BJP believes Shah’s stance and assertion that the new citizenship law will not be withdrawn will prove to be the “game changer” in these elections along with Prime Minister Modi’s popularity and recent decisions taken by his government.

The BJP, which will be holding several small public meetings in the days to come, also believes that such “close-contact meetings” will help it gain support from the “floating voters”, who often are the deciding factors in the Assembly elections where winning margins are smaller. 

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