BJP again to run three key municipal corporations
NEW DELHI : The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday won the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) polls and retained the three municipal corporations for the third term. BJP again to run three key municipal corporations, handing the party a huge win that it has credited to Narendra Modi’s leadership.
The AAP’s rout comes more than two years after the Delhi Assembly Elections when the fledgling political outfit humiliated the BJP winning 67 of the 70 Delhi Assembly polls when it got a huge 54 percent of the votes. The BJP won three seats that year but registered 33 percent of the vote share.
The BJP has called AAP a poor loser. “The same EVMs gave them 67 of 70 seats in the Assembly election. That time it was fine but now you have lost, there is problem with EVMs,” said Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The party’s Shazia Ilmi, a former member of AAP, said “Kejriwal is a drama queen.”
For AAP, today’s loss is a new political low. Chief Minister Kejriwal’s party, which had swept assembly elections in Delhi two years ago, is already reeling from humiliating losses in the Punjab and Goa assembly elections last month.
The only contest today was for a poor number 2 between Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress. AAP gets that consolation prize, with the Congress third in all the municipalities. The Congress’ Delhi chief Ajay Maken has resigned, while AAP has alleged that rigged voting machines led to its rout. “The people of Delhi have rejected negative politics, the politics of excuses,” said BJP president Amit Shah.
Its a third term straight for the BJP, which has won 64 of 104 wards in MCD North, 70 of 104 in MCD South and 48 of 64 in MCD East, well over the halfway mark in all three. In each, it has bettered last time’s performance. The MCD was split into three corporations in 2012.
The corporations will be full of new faces. The BJP, faced with allegations of a substandard handling of Delhi’s civic needs, had sought to beat any anti-incumbency sentiment by dropping its sitting councilors and picking new candidates in 267 of the total 272 wards.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has congratulated the BJP and said his “government looks forward to working with the MCDs for the betterment of Delhi.”
Several of his lieutenants, including Deputy Chief Minister Manisha Sisodia has alleged that EVMs or Electronic Voting Machines were rigged to help the BJP win the MCD elections. “This is an EVM wave not a Modi wave,” said Delhi minister Gopal Rai.
The Congress had hoped today’s results would bring a political revival for it, after it did not win a single seat in the Delhi assembly elections in 2015 or a parliament seat the year before.
Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken, meanwhile, took moral responsibility for the party’s poor show and announced he was resigning from his post as the Congress’ Delhi chief and would not hold any party post for a year.
He said the Congress was the day’s big gainer on vote share today, but he had expected to do better. Just ahead of the MCD polls some top Delhi Congress leaders quit the party and joined the BJP as a rebellion bubbled against Mr Maken.
The win today is an important addition to the BJP’s list of victories this year in state and local polls across the country. The party worked hard to win, still smarting at being reduced to just three seats in the Delhi assembly in 2015, as AAP swept 67 of the 70 seats. In the 2014 national election, the BJP had won all seven of Delhi’s parliament seats.
A total of 2,537 candidates were in the fray for North Delhi Municipal Corporation (103 seats) and South Delhi Municipal Corporation (104 seats), and East Delhi Municipal Corporation (63 seats).
Social activist Anna Hazare blames his former protege and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal`s quest for power behind the Aam Aadmi Party`s debacle in the Delhi civic polls. “People gave him a mandate and he got an opportunity to turn Delhi into a model state for the entire country to replicate. But power is bad. Once you sit in the chair, you lose your power of thinking,” says Hazare.
“EVM bahana: seems AAP leaders have not just lost elections, they’ve lost it,” tweets Yogendra Yadav, whose Swaraj India party failed to win even a single seat in the civic polls in Delh
