PRESS TRUST OF INDIA |
New Delhi, Dec 07 |15: It isn’t often that Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal finds himself in a dilemma. But the forthcoming Assembly election in West Bengal is likely to push him into one. Unlike Punjab, where his Aam Aadmi Party will go the whole hog to try and wrest the state from the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP combine, and displace the Opposition Congress as the main alternative; in West Bengal, his political and personal rapport with the Communists on the one hand, and Trinamool Congress chief and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on the other, will make it difficult for him to adopt a Bihar-like strategy. During the recently-concluded Bihar polls, Kejriwal openly supported the JDU’s Nitish Kumar as chief minister to help him fight off the BJP and its mascot Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The only satisfaction for Kejriwal will be that no matter the victor in West Bengal, it will be a party with which AAP can identify and work on a larger canvas. And yet the eastern state is far too crucial for him to watch from the sidelines, more so since the polls in the 294-member Assembly ties up with the elections for 126 Assembly seats in Assam where the ruling Congress is on a slippery wicket as Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi battles the incumbency of three consecutive terms in office. Besides the regional Asam Gana Parishad party and Maulana Badruddin Ajmal’s All-India United Democratic Front which won 18 seats in the last Assembly elections, the field in the northeastern state is wide open for an aspiring third player ranging from the Left to the Trinamool and even AAP, particularly because the BJP, which had only five Assembly seats in 2011, managed to win seven out of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 and is now targetting 84 seats in the forthcoming Assembly polls. The saffron party had done well in the 2014 General Elections in West Bengal where it had won only two seats but secured 16.8 percent of the votes — an increase of over 10 percent compared to its previous tally. Elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry are slated for the first half of 2016, with the Assemblies completing their terms between May and early June. Punjab, along with crucial states like Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur and Uttarakhand, head to the polls in 2017. However, the real test for AAP will be in 2018 in the bipolar politics of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where it will seek to replace a decrepit Congress as the main and fresh alternative to the ruling BJP. AAP will ideally like to explore this vast political landscape. But the 2014 General Election has been a major lesson for its agitationist-turnedchief minister: Not to spread his resources too thin or get into ‘misadventures’ that drag the party down. “It is one step at a time now,” maintained a source, thereby indicating that AAP’s path for the immediate future lies in turning Delhi into a successful model of governance of, by and for the people, so that it fetches the party political dividends in other parts of the country in general, and the neighbouring states in particular. At the same time, the party will hope to build linkages with other non-BJP, nonCongress formations and leaders. This, in effect, means that AAP will resist the temptation of rushing in unless it hopes to capture the political space as it did in Delhi, and as it hopes to do in the 2017 polls for 117 seats in Punjab, where it might project state convenor Sucha Singh Chhotepur as its chief ministerial candidate. However, its main rival in the quest for power against the decadelong SAD-BJP government is not the Congress party, but the towering persona of Congress leader Captain Amarinder Singh. With 13 months in hand, AAP is expected to pour all its efforts into Punjab where its internal surveys, it claims, have shown positive results.
