New Delhi: The battle lines for the upcoming Delhi assembly elections are almost entirely drawn now with the BJP announcing its candidates for 57 of the 70 seats.
The saffron party has yet to take a decision on the remaining 13 seats, which includes New Delhi from where chief minister Arvind Kejriwal is contesting, and Kalkaji from where Atishi, the architect of the school educational reforms, has entered the fray.
Women remain underrepresented
The BJP list has 11 members from the Scheduled Caste category and only four women. Incidentally, the participation of women from the saffron party has been proportionately low thus far as in 2015 it had fielded 15 of them. While Congress is yet to announce its candidates, AAP has announced its line-up for all 70 seats and its includes eight women.
Delhi BJP president Manoj Tiwari, who made the announcement, said the decision on the candidates was taken at a Central Election Committee meeting of the party chaired by national president Amit Shah and attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and working president J.P. Nadda.
Also read: Delhi Assembly Polls: AAP Drops 15 Sitting MLAs in List of 70 Candidates
As he read out the list of 57 names, Tiwari made it a point to explain how many of these seats were under the reserved category and the background of some of the candidates.
No dearth of turncoats in list
The interesting part of the BJP list is that it has given tickets to two former AAP MLAs Kapil Mishra and Anil Bajpai. While Bajpai has got it from Gandhi Nagar, which he won in 2015, Mishra has had to contend with Model Town as against Karawal Nagar from which he had won on the AAP ticket last time.
The party has also given tickets to former Congress MLA S.C. Vats from Shakur Basti and three-term MLA Ramvir Singh Bidhuri – who won on a Janata Dal ticket in 1993, on Nationalist Congress Party ticket in 2003 and on BJP ticket in 2013 – from Badarpur.
Incidentally, former Delhi minister Raj Kumar Chauhan who moved to the BJP from Congress after he was denied a Lok Sabha ticket in 2019, was earlier tipped to get the party ticket from Mangolpuri. He was also a member of Delhi BJP’s manifesto committee but had following a meeting with Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi earlier this week distanced himself from BJP. The party has now fielded Karam Singh Karma from the constituency.
Mayors, sitting MLAs accommodated
BJP has also given tickets to two former mayors – Ravindra Gupta from Matia Mahal and Khushi Ram from Ambedkar Nagar.
The saffron party, which won just three assembly seats in the 2015 polls, that was swept by AAP, has again given the tickets from these seats to the sitting MLAs. So leader of party in Delhi assembly, Vijender Gupta, has once again been fielded from Rohini; while O.P. Sharma would once again get to contest from Vishwas Nagar and Jagdish Pradhan from Mustafabad.
Also read: How Fiscally Profligate is Delhi’s AAP Government Really?
Relatives also get a look in
The relatives of some prominent leaders of the party have also been granted tickets. So from Tughlaqabad, the party has fielded Vikram Bidhuri, the nephew of South Delhi MP Ramesh Bidhuri, while from Ballimaran it has given the ticket to councillor Lata Sodhi, who is also the daughter-in-law of former legislator Moti Lal Sodhi. Rajeev Babbar, son of former MLA O.P. Babbar, will be the BJP candidate from Tilak Nagar.