Thorny road ahead for AAP?
Sandwiched between BJP, Cong, ruling party may lose some seats.
NEW DELHI: As the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) tries hard to sell its development and people-oriented governance on the completion of three years in power on Wednesday, the road ahead is not an easy one for the party.
Among the many challenges the AAP is facing are the prospects of a mini-Assembly poll before the general election 2019, thanks to the disqualification of 20 of its MLAs by the EC recently.
Faced with a dominant BJP and a resurgent Congress, the AAP stares at losing out on some seats, even though it will still manage to hold sway in the 70-member Delhi Assembly.
The impending election will be a litmus test for chief minister Arvind Kejriwal whose popularity has witnessed a downward graph; the party lost the Rajouri Garden bypoll last year to BJP’s maninderjit Singh Sirsa.
The party, which made its debut in the civic polls last year, suffered a massive defeat on all three seats it contested.
The AAP had stormed to power in 2015 by bagging a mammoth 67 seats and as a Valentine’s Day present to Delhiites, Mr Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues took oath on February 14 that year.
Three years later, the party organised a grand event themed ‘good governance and honest politics’ — a phone-in programme with the chief minister, where Mr Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues will answer the questions posed by the people, live.
The ruling party, which captured power as it had promised to usher in an era of alternative politics, seems to have wavered from its path and has towed the line of traditional parties by offering the Rajya Sabha tickets to two rank outsiders — Sushil Gupta and Narayan Das Gupta.
Over the past three years, the party has hogged headlines for its involvement in turf war with the lieutenant governor and a power struggle over a range of issues.
While the ruling party had promised to bring some real changes to Delhi, including providing free Wi-Fi connectivity, deploying marshals for women’s security in the public transport buses, subsidised canteens , clean environment among a host of others, much of these promises are yet to be fulfilled.
It now remains to be seen what the party is able to deliver in the remaining two years.