BJP gears up for Assembly polls
New Delhi: With the Delhi Assembly elections due to be announced anytime now, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has swung into action in time for the crucial polls and formed 35 panels for various election-related activities. The ruling party in the Centre will be contesting the polls in the Capital after having lost key Assembly polls in the states of Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh in the last one year.
But this time around, Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari has said that his party has adopted a "fully democratic" process to distribute tickets for the assembly seats, making it clear that winnability of the candidate will be the key consideration for giving out party tickets. "The BJP ticket distribution will be fully democratic and we will allow all party persons to apply for it," Tiwari said.
Earlier, there were reports that the party this time may not consider its municipal councillors and those leaders who lost back to back assembly elections in 2013 and 2015. Other factors which will be considered are popularity and "clean image", he said. "There is a long list of ticket seekers but those having reach within a constituency and a clean track record will be natural choices," Tiwari asserted.
A senior BJP leader claimed that the central party leadership is conducting a set of three surveys to shortlist names of probable candidates for the upcoming polls. These surveys will determine who will get the ticket among the applicants, he said. In a previous exercise, the Delhi unit of the saffron party had sought recommendations from district units of names of probable candidates in various assembly segments, yielding an average of four-five names per seat.
The Delhi BJP has also launched a publicity drive to highlight the Narendra Modi government's decision to regularise unauthorised colonies in the Capital and has decided to install over 5,000 hoardings with an image of the Prime Minister and a message in these settlements. The move is aimed to garner votes of an estimated 40 lakh residents living in the 1,731 unauthorised colonies which are due to be regularised due to the recently passed legislation by Parliament.
The polls for the 70-seat Delhi Assembly are likely to be announced soon, with the current Assembly set to expire on February 22, 2020. In the 2015 polls, the ruling AAP won 67 seats while the BJP managed to get just three. The BJP has an uphill task at hand with the ruling AAP declaring that they will cross their current tally on the strength of the work done by the Arvind Kejriwal government.
