New Delhi: Delhi is set to witness a three-cornered contest on May 12 as the Congress has so far decided not to forge any alliance with the Aaam Aadmi Party to take on the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.
There are indications that the AAP is making all possible efforts to stitch together an alliance with Congress, but the later seems reluctant as it fears that any such move would go a long way in harming its prospects in the coming Assembly elections.
In the absence of any formidable alliance between the Congress and the AAP, there is going to be a split in the anti-BJP votes which will ultimately work in favour of the saffron party, which had previously won all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi by defeating all the sitting Congress MPs.
After state leadership recently met Congress president Rahul Gandhi, things were crystal clear that the party was in no mood to join hands with the AAP which ousted it from power in 2013, following with a complete wipeout in 2015 Assembly elections. That year, AAP won 67 of the 70 Assembly seats, but Congress failed to win even one.
Ever since, the AAP has faced a decline in popularity and fortune. It lost to the Congress in the Punjab Assembly elections of March 2017 and month later to the BJP in the all three municipal bodies in Delhi. To counter anti-incumbency factor, the BJP had strategically replaced all the sitting councilors with new faces in the municipal polls.
While the Congress was still delving upon the option on whether to go in for seat sharing arrangement with the AAP to take on the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo in the Lok Sabha polls, there was strong resentment in the state unit against any such move as the local leaders feel that any such arrangement would wipe out the party in the city’s political arena. It is learnt that Delhi Congress president Sheila Dikshit had a last-minute discussions with UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi to see whether any alliance with AAP will work in favour of her party, but all in vain.
The Congress move not to stitch together any alliance with the AAP is being interpreted in the political circles as a major bolt to the newbie AAP that had promised to support it in Goa and Gujarat where Arvind Kejriwal’s outfit had contested seriously in the last Assembly polls but had failed to make much impact. After the Congress announced that it was not in favour of going in for any alliance with the AAP, rattled Kejriwal said that the party had a “secret understanding” with the BJP and his party was ready to fight the unholy alliance.
Mr Kejriwal had said if Congress did not join hands with AAP, this would definitely split anti-BJP votes in the national capital. And to mount pressure on Congress, his party had even named candidates for the six of the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi.
