The Aam Aadmi Party has put in place an elaborate strategy to gain the influence of the Purvanchali voter in the capital ahead of the February 7 Assembly elections. Senior party leaders said a team has been constituted under the guidance of leaders from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and posters will be made to appeal to the Purvanchali pride. Five of the AAP’s 28 MLAs in the last Assembly were Purvanchalis. There are close to 40 lakh Purvanchali voters in the capital, crucial to as many as 15 seats. “The new team within the party will work under the leadership of Neeraj Pathak and Ramesh Mohan Srivastava. A team of volunteers from Varanasi has also arrived to help it,” a senior leader said. Pathak was the party’s Lok Sabha candidate from Madhubani in Bihar, while Ramesh Mohan Srivastava was part of the UP campaign committee. AAP leaders said the focus on the Puvanchali vote was necessitated by some of the gains the BJP made during the Lok Sabha campaign. “The BJP gained ground among the Purvanchalis because of Narendra Modi’s decision to fight from Varanasi and an intensive campaign in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. So some of our votes from the last Assembly elections did swing to the BJP. Also, fielding Manoj Tiwari, a cult hero among them, was a smart move,” a senior leader said. However, in their message in the door-to-door campaign, the AAP plans to point out that 10 of their candidates are from the region. “By our reckoning, two candidates of the Congress and three from the BJP are Purvanchalis. But we have 10, while in the last Assembly election we had nine. We put five Purvanchali MLAs in the Delhi Assembly and we will put out that it is the AAP that truly speaks for them,” a leader in charge of planning said. The 10 candidates, four of whom are originally from Bihar and six from UP, also come from a mix of castes. For instance, Rituraj Jha is a Brahmin, Somnath Bharti comes from the Baniya community and Dinesh Mohaniya is a Thakur. The AAP also plans to play up the “treatment” meted out to Manoj Tiwari by the BJP. “The BJP had many options among Purvanchali voters, but chose to field only three. Manoj Tiwari raised his voice against Kiran Bedi’s elevation as a candidate, and has been sidelined. Vijay Goel even spoke against the migration of people from UP and Bihar to Delhi. In the pamphlet and campaign, we will tell people that while their problems are the problems of Delhi, it is the AAP that gives them respect and representation,” a leader said.
