New Delhi: Voting is underway for the 70 seats in the Delhi Assembly elections on Saturday, with Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party giving a tough fight to the BJP.
Kejriwal is looking to complete an unlikely comeback and deliver the first major blow to Narendra Modi.
Less than a year on from his resignation as Chief Minister of Delhi after just 49 days, most polls say Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party is in line to push Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party into second place when results are announced on Tuesday.
After apologising for leaving voters without an elected government for a year, Kejriwal has appealed for another chance from the voters.
Meanwhile, the BJP, which is out of power in Delhi for the last 16 years, made a gamble by bringing former Team Anna member Kiran Bedi into the party and making her its chief ministerial candidate, which is said to have triggered discontent among the party leaders and rank and file.
BJP strategy has been countered by the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP which has put up a spirited campaign in a bid to stop the Modi juggernaut that has been on a roll ever since the Lok Sabha election victory in May last year.
BJP leader Amit Shah and union ministers M Venkaiah Naidu and Arun Jaitley have dismissed projections that the Delhi election is a referendum on the Modi government’s performance, a statement seen by critics as an effort to shield the Prime Minister from any criticism.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday asked voters in Delhi, especially the youth to go out and vote in record numbers.
The Congress, which had ruled Delhi for 15 years till December, 2013 has been projected way behind AAP and BJP in pre-poll surveys. Some opinion polls have given AAP a clear majority while a few have predicted BJP’s win.
Over 1.33 crore electorate will decide the fate of 673 candidates in the fray. Polling is taking place at 12,177 polling stations, of which 714 have been identified as “critical”. Of these, 191 are “highly critical”.
Of the 70 assembly constituencies that are being contested, 58 are in the general category and 12 are in the Scheduled Caste category. There are no Scheduled Tribe constituencies in the national capital.
