New Delhi: The tottering INDIA bloc was dealt another blow ahead of Delhi assembly polls with AAP accusing the Congress of being “hand in glove” with BJP and threatening to “oust” the principal opposition party from the alliance by consulting its other constituents.
The AAP, which had refrained from joining the chorus initiated by AITC to get West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to lead the INDIA bloc, accused leaders of Congress’s Delhi unit Thursday of “crossing all limits” by labelling Arvind Kejriwal as an “anti-national”.
“If national leadership of the Congress wants to establish that the party has not colluded with the BJP in Delhi, then it should act against Ajay Maken and other leaders of its Delhi unit within 24 hours,” Delhi CM Atishi said at a press conference in the presence of AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh.
Maken, while releasing a ‘White Paper’ on the “black deeds” of the AAP government in Delhi and the BJP-led Centre the previous day, called Kejriwal an “anti-national” and a “person driven not by ideology, but personal ambition”. Congress’s Sandeep Dikshit, fielded against Kejriwal from the New Delhi seat, too has been targeting the AAP on a daily basis.
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Atishi also claimed that the campaigns of Dikshit, and Farhad Suri, fielded by the Congress against AAP’s Manish Sisodia from Jangpura, was being “funded by BJP”. “The Congress should act against Ajay Maken within 24 hours. Otherwise we will talk to other INDIA bloc members to oust the party from the alliance,” Sanjay Singh said.
At one level, political mudslinging between leaders of the Congress and AAP appears par for the course, with assembly elections, which the two parties are fighting separately, around the corner. Yet, this escalation comes at a time when the INDIA bloc is teetering on the brink of collapse.
As far as the two parties are concerned, there are various reasons behind AAP’s ultimatum.
Firstly, Kejriwal had in the past too floated the idea of creating a front comprising non-Congress and non-BJP parties. Just ahead of the formation of the INDIA bloc, in March 2023, he convened a meeting of eight CMs affiliated not to the Congress or BJP for a dialogue on “governance”. But, the meeting did not materialise since the invited CMs— including Banerjee, Tamil Nadu CM M.K. Stalin, Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan, Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar and then Telangana CM KCR—skipped it citing various preoccupations. As AAP found itself cornered over the excise policy case, Kejriwal shelved that idea, deciding to collaborate with the Congress.
However, with the Congress now reeling under a string of losses, first in Haryana and then in the Maharashtra assembly polls, along with weak performances in Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand, Kejriwal senses an opportunity to revive the idea.
Secondly, before AAP cornered its vote share, the Congress drew its support in Delhi primarily from the working class and the lower middle class. And it’s been observed that a surge in the Congress’s vote share is most likely to come at the cost of AAP.
With Sheila Dikshit, the mother of Sandeep Dikshit, as the chief minister, the Congress governed Delhi uninterruptedly from 1998 to 2013. In 2013, AAP, making its debut in electoral politics after having dented the image of the UPA government in its India Against Corruption (IAC) movement avatar, bagged 28 seats. The Congress, which won only eight seats, surprised everyone by extending outside support to AAP to deny BJP a shot at power. Within 49-days, the arrangement collapsed. And since then, it’s been downhill for the Congress in Delhi.
On Wednesday, Maken said the Congress’s decision to help AAP form government in 2013 was a “mistake”.
Thirdly, by going on the offensive against the Congress, AAP also hopes to prevent a division in minority votes, at a time it is often found echoing BJP’s political rhetoric wary of being branded as “pro-minority”.
Its “strategic silence” during the 2020 Northeast Delhi communal riots and the Shaheen Bagh protests aside, in recent times, AAP has been on an overdrive to counter BJP’s charge that Rohingya Muslims have been allowed to illegally settle in the city-state, prompting the Congress to allege that Kejriwal is ideologically aligned with BJP.
Till the Lok Sabha polls, the dynamics were completely different.
The AAP and the Congress jointly fought the Lok Sabha polls in Delhi, fielding four and three candidates respectively, as well as in Gujarat, Goa, Chandigarh and Haryana. In Delhi, the alliance came a cropper, with BJP sweeping all seven seats, obtaining a vote share more than the combined share of AAP and the Congress.
Nevertheless, AAP leaders continued to feature prominently in meetings of the INDIA bloc, inside and outside Parliament. But the Congress’s string of recent electoral losses made it vulnerable to attacks from the other parties of the alliance.
The AAP and the Congress fought Haryana assembly polls separately too, after seat-sharing talks failed. However, Kejriwal, or other AAP leaders who campaigned in Haryana, largely desisted from attacking the Congress. On its part, the Congress made some noises about AAP being BJP’s “B-team”, but there were no frontal attacks on the party.
On 1 December, Kejriwal announced that AAP would go solo in the Delhi assembly polls. While leaders of the Congress’s Delhi unit had been consistently advising the party’s national leadership to not have any truck with AAP, until then, the Congress high command had not ruled out any such possibility.
“After having unilaterally closed the door on the Congress, what did he expect? It is parties like AAP which always insisted that INDIA bloc was only for national politics,” a senior Delhi Congress leader told ThePrint Thursday, minutes after AAP’s press conference, in which Atishi and Sanjay Singh suggested that Maken’s attack on Kejriwal was the last straw.
“They call Kejriwal anti-national. They are getting FIRs lodged against him. This is the same Kejriwal who campaigned for Congress candidates in Delhi and Chandigarh [during Lok Sabha polls]. AAP did not make one statement against the Congress in Haryana despite them not giving us seats,” Singh said.
On Thursday, Dikshit also lodged a complaint against Kejriwal with Delhi L-G Vinay Kumar Saxena, accusing the former CM of gathering personal information of women voters “fraudulently” in the name of a monthly financial assistance scheme.
Dikshit approached the L-G a day after Delhi government’s women and child development and health departments issued public notices, disowning Mahila Samman Yojana and Sanjeevani health assistance schemes for the elderly announced by Kejriwal.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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