All four Municipal election candidates of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) are conducting door-to-door campaigns in their respective wards in Rajouri Garden very religiously and have covered more than half the seats.
Even AAP candidate for the Rajouri Garden by-election Harjeet Singh is doing padyatras, with large crowds welcoming him and accepting him with a tremendous reception. AAP's work in the past and its recent announcement of abolishing house tax is proving to be a boost for it all across Rajouri Garden.
AAP leaders Ashutosh, Atishi Marlena, Ashish Khetan, Raghav Chadha and others are doing booth-wise indoor meetings in small groups. More than 150 such meetings have been planned.
Star campaigners like Manish Sisodia have already addressed meetings in Rajouri Garden. AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal is likely to include Rajouri Garden in the list of 25 to 30 meetings that he will be addressing during the MCD elections campaig.
Notably, the Rajouri Garden Assembly Constituency by-election will be crucial for the ruling AAP, which will be a litmus test for the Delhi Chief Minister after his party's political debacle in Punjab and Goa.
AAP had registered a historical victory in the 2015 Delhi Assembly election. Former Rajouri Garden MLA Jarnail Singh had resigned a few months ago after he was fielded as a candidate for the party from Lambi in Punjab's Muktsar district against former Punjab Chief Minister Singh Parkash Singh Badal.
Jarnail Singh, however, lost against the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) patron.
Rajouri Garden Assembly Constituency is a Punjabi and Sikh-dominated area of West Delhi, from where Delhi Congress Chief and former Union Minister Ajay Maken had won three consecutive times between 1993, 1998 and 2003.
Maken went on to become an MP from the New Delhi Parliamentary seat in 2004 and the subsequent bypoll was won by Congress' Ramesh Lamba.
After delimitation of Delhi Assembly constituencies in 2008, former Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit had fielded a former BJP man Dayanand Chandela from Rajouri Garden.