CM Kejriwal out of jail, AAP to now rewrite its campaign from scratch

The reverberations of the relief given to Kejriwal were felt not only in the Aam Aadmi Party, which cancelled all its rallies and programmes for the day and asked all its leaders to reach the party office near ITO, but at a Congress rally as well.

Several kilometres away, a man carrying AAP and Congress flags on his shoulders in Northeast Delhi’s Taharpur announced during an auto-rickshaw rally in support of Congress candidate Kanhaiya Kumar, “Kejriwal has got bail.” Kumar, as soon as he got the news, announced amid his campaign, “I congratulate everyone that Arvind Kejriwal ji has got bail.”

The BJP, meanwhile, which has held several deliberations on the possibility of Kejriwal’s release — with one as recently as last week — will also rethink its strategy by pushing for more rallies by senior leaders, including the PM, sources said.

AAP’s strategy is to make sure that Kejriwal campaigns across the country, covering as many constituencies as possible. “He will campaign wherever INDIA bloc parties ask him to and not just in constituencies where AAP candidates are contesting. The entire strategy will now change,” a senior AAP leader said.

Where the focus of AAP’s campaign so far has been Kejriwal’s arrest, the poster of the first roadshow that he will hold on Saturday read, “Tiger is back”. The roadshow, in South Delhi’s Mehrauli, will also have Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann in attendance.

“Him coming out of jail is a big leg-up for us. It is no secret that he is the best speaker we have and his connection with the people is unmatched. But that is not the only thing that he will have an impact on. Apart from re-energising the cadre, he will have a critical look at organisational tasks assigned to different party workers and make changes wherever required. What we expected is a clear guideline to all workers to campaign for INDIA bloc partners — Congress in the case of Delhi — to the best of their ability and make sure there is synergy on the ground,” a senior party leader said.

For the BJP, too, the campaign changes. Sources said that the party feels that his temporary release from jail will have a negative impact on its chances in at least three out of seven seats — Northeast Delhi, Chandni Chowk and West Delhi. “These are seats where the population in JJ colonies and slums is high and their residents have traditionally been AAP supporters, and before that, of the Congress. In 2019, we could manage just a little over 40% of the vote share from those living in such areas in these Lok Sabha seats while the rest was split between AAP and Congress,” a senior BJP leader said.

“With both parties not only in alliance with each other but also campaigning together, the chances of a split in their common vote share are getting narrower and the possibility of transfer of the vote share of one onto the other is more plausible,” the leader added.