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Journalism of Courage
As campaigning for the Delhi Assembly elections enters the last day, it is becoming increasingly clear that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s trenchant criticism of Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) counterpunches is likely to complicate the equations between the two parties at the INDIA bloc high table after the polls.
Behind Gandhi’s rare personal attacks on Kejriwal is the calculation that it will help Congress candidates bounce back in the national capital — where it was in power from 1998 to 2013 but has been relegated to being a minor player since then — at the cost of the AAP. The Delhi Congress and the high command seem to be finally on the same page on this.
While the Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition attacked the AAP government in his first campaign rally in Delhi on January 14, he has shifted gears in the second phase of his campaign. He has singled out Kejriwal and even equated him with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin.
Congress leaders argue that the BJP has a captive vote bank in the capital — its vote share remained more or less between 32% and 38% in the Assembly elections since 1998 — and does not largely overlap with that of the Congress. The AAP, on the other hand, has taken away almost all of the Congress’s support base.
“Our appeal among the BJP vote bank is limited. Even in our heyday, we could not break into their support base and that will remain so. We need to get back our support base which had moved to the AAP,” said a Congress leader. The Congress cannot afford to play footsie with the AAP and “our central leaders have realised this now”, he said.
What has also angered the Congress central leadership is the AAP’s targeting of Gandhi, listing him in a campaign poster of “dishonest” people among many other leaders from the Congress and the BJP. Since then, Gandhi has questioned Kejriwal’s brand of politics and linked him to corruption allegations. The Congress leader has also called the AAP and the BJP “anti-Dalit and anti-reservation” and has argued that Dalits, the backward classes, and religious minorities have no place on the AAP table. He has pointed out that the AAP’s top leadership has no one from the deprived sections.
“The BJP and the Congress were conventional opponents in Delhi. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We can come back only when the AAP is taken out of the equation,” said a Congress leader.
Congress leaders claim that the party’s internal surveys show that its candidates in at least half a dozen seats are giving a tough fight — the party claims they are in a winnable position — and overall its vote share may touch double digits from the present 4.63% (in the seats it contested). While the Congress assessment was misplaced in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, and Maharashtra, party leaders base the aggressive targeting of the AAP on the “feedback from the ground”.
The AAP is the only regional outfit to have ousted the Congress from power in two places — Delhi and Punjab — in recent history. Besides, Gandhi, like most Congress leaders, believes it was the Anna Hazare movement, of which Kejriwal was a part, that triggered the party’s nationwide collapse in 2014.
The Congress’s 2013 defeat in Delhi was part of a series of losses to a regional party. The Telugu Desam Party and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (then the Telangana Rashtra Samithi) came to power in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in 2014 ousting the Congress from power. The Shiromani Akali Dal had done the same in Punjab in 2007.
When the Congress and the AAP contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Delhi in alliance, Gandhi famously noted that it was interesting that while he would vote for the first time for an AAP candidate in the New Delhi seat, Kejriwal would cast his vote for the Congress nominee in Chandni Chowk. Even then, the two never campaigned together.
