By SMITA GUPTA, for The Hindu
After its 49-day brush with governance early last year, the feisty Aam Aadmi Party has bounced back enough to mount a serious challenge to the Bharatiya Janata Party in its battle to recapture the Delhi Assembly: with five days left for the elections, no one in the national capital appears willing to bet on the outcome of the polls for which the BJP has deployed 20 Union Ministers, 120 MPs and an increasingly expensive advertising campaign, some of it not entirely in good taste.
If the AAP walks into the history books by trouncing the BJP, for the Opposition parties not in the electoral fray in the national capital, the result of this “David versus Goliath” encounter will be of utmost significance.
Conversations with Opposition leaders suggest that they believe Delhi could be the turning point, after almost nine months of Modi rule; not just that, they think it could also provide some breathing space for other BJP leaders. This is because, they point out, whatever happens in the national capital has a way of getting magnified.
“After the Lok Sabha election last year, the so-called Modi magic continued towork in State elections, perhaps slightly less in Jammu and Kashmir, but it certainly surprised us in Haryana,” K.C. Tyagi, Janata Dal (United) general secretary, acknowledged. “But if there is an AAP victory in Delhi, it will start a new phase in Opposition politics, for the soul of the nation resides in the capital.”
Such a result, he said, will strengthen the entire Opposition: it will not only have a “very positive impact” on the Bihar elections scheduled for later this year, “the voice of the democratic opposition will resound in Parliament.” It will also be the “first check to Modi’s authoritarian rule,” he stressed while “strengthening his colleagues in the BJP who have been silenced by him.”
If Mr. Tyagi appears to be pinning a lot of hopes on the AAP, CPI(M) Lok Sabha member Mohammad Salim, although somewhat less hopeful, agreed that the Delhi elections are special. “If the AAP wins this election, it will change the mood in the country: people will begin to question the BJP’s high-handedness, the way it has been issuing ordinances, bypassing Parliament. The secular opposition will be strengthened,” he said adding, “It will prove that people don’t believe the BJP can fight corruption, a plank it tried to hijack from the AAP; and that it is unable to address the problems of the poor.” In short, “it will establish that Mr. Modi is not the last word in politics.”
Clearly, a great deal depends on what happens on February 7 in the national capital, where voters range from the aspirational middle class, the backbone of the BJP, to the struggling — also aspirational — underclass of migrants, now rooting for the AAP, to government servants. Till the results come in, Delhi, and the Opposition, will hold its breath.
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