Delhi back to polls

The writing on the wall was very clear. Right after the results of the December 2013 polls came out, the numbers showed no party could provide a stable government in the 70-member house. True, the BJP with 31 seats was the largest single party, but then it was five short of the halfway mark of 36, and there was no way the other two formations the Aam Aadmi Party (28) and the Congress (8) were going to lend a helping hand. Initially, the AAP and Congress came together so that the debutant Arvind Kejriwal could become the CM.

The event was hailed as the arrival of the politics of the third force. But then vaulting ambitions of the protestor-turned-CM were soaring too high and the office of the Chief Minister of Delhi seemed too small to contain these. Within 49 days exactly, he stepped down to have a go at the Lok Sabha elections, and pitted himself directly against the BJP’s PM candidate Narendra Modi at Varanasi. Modi won a handsome victory and in a parallel show of strength the BJP captured all the seven Lok Sabha seats in the Delhi region.

Of course, Kejriwal is now back again on the streets of Delhi to test his chief ministerial potential. The elections could have been called much earlier, and all the constitutional authorities have played their role in this delay. The result has been the absence of a representative government for almost a year. As the ruling party at the centre, the BJP had the last word in this respect, and it was only after the political decision was taken at the highest level that the decks were cleared for the dissolution of the assembly. Clearly, after their emphatic wins in Maharashtra and Haryana, and now being rated as the favourites in both Jharkhand and J&K, the Modi-Shah combine is looking for the kill in the national capital as well. Besides, whatever be the pecking order, in terms of political clout the Delhi CM comes almost next to the PM, and so the internal battle also is quite fierce.

So, logically, the BJP has decided to keep its options open and unlike 2013 when it had named Dr Harsh Vardhan (now Union Health Minister) as its CM nominee would fight the battle with a collective leadership. It can be expected that a new face shall emerge as all the earlier equations have undergone a change after the party bagged power at the centre. Right now the electoral contest is billed as a tussle between the BJP and the AAP for the top spot, and the only interest with regard to the Congress that ruled the city state for 15 long years is whether it can improve its 2013 tally of eight or would it slip further into irrelevance.