How BJP, AAP are changing the game to win Delhi Election 2015, BJP, AAP try to change the game for winning delhi election 2015, Delhi assembly polls news updates

How BJP, AAP are changing the game to win Delhi Election 2015

On January 15, one of the BJP’s seniormost Delhi leaders was “roaming around” with a few disgruntled AAP men who were supposed to join the party when he got a call asking him to be present at the party’s national headquarters on Ashoka Road. He dropped all that he was doing to rush there. That’s when he got to know that Kiran Bedi was joining the party.

Elsewhere, in a room at 173, North Avenue, with four televisions on one wall and two sofas lining the other, the AAP’s strategic thinktank looked on nervously as every television channel beamed the day’s ‘Breaking News’ with images of BJP president Amit Shah and Bedi. “It wasn’t a surprise because the rumours had been circulating for a while. For the first 48 hours, there was definitely a sense that this could prove to be a big challenge.

There were no official meetings, but there was talk of how this could change the elections. This was a woman whose past we could not attack because she had worked so closely with Arvind Kejriwal. But soon, we realised we could cash in on her opportunism. So on autos across the city, we put out posters calling her an avsarvadi (opportunist),” says an AAP leader.

Bedi, a former IPS officer and a core member of Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption team, was now the newest player on Delhi’s poll scene. Suddenly, with just days left for the Assembly elections, the rules of the game had changed for both the BJP and AAP — undoubtedly the two biggest parties in Delhi’s political slugfest.

Old game, new rules

Till a few months before the dates for the Delhi Assembly elections were announced, a confident BJP, riding on the Narendra Modi-led juggernaut, didn’t seem to think it needed any change in strategy to win the Capital. After all, it had emerged victorious in Haryana and Jharkhand without a chief ministerial face, and Delhi, it thought, would be easy game. But soon, realisation dawned.

The first big shock came with Modi’s rally held at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan on January 10, his first in Delhi since he became Prime Minister, when the party expected a one-lakh turnout but saw only 40,000 people turning up. By then, there were internal surveys of the BJP and other independent surveys that took the message to the party headquarters that the AAP would be no pushover.

That’s when Shah decided to take charge of the Delhi elections. On November 18, in the first of a series of meetings that the party president held with the state leadership, Shah said that the AAP must be countered at its own game. “Fight them as if they are an NGO, not a political party,” he said. That, say Delhi unit leaders, was the first hint that Bedi would be brought in. A month later, she joined the party.

A clear shift had taken place. The Delhi state leadership was now no longer doing the strategising and the action had shifted to the party’s Ashoka Road national headquarters. Shah now has a list of people in charge of different poll booths and communicates directly with them. A national team headed by Arvind Gupta has been roped in to handle the social media campaign. This team tracks trending hashtags and sends Shah a list every night.

In a recent addresses to booth-level workers, Shah told workers that they should be very clear about the message they take to the voters. “Kejriwal and his party took the Metro when they came to take their oath. Now the blue WagonR has vanished and has been replaced with an Innova. They pledged that they would not take the support of the BJP or the Congress but they formed the government with the Congress. Kejriwal flies executive class to Dubai to raise funds for the party. Modiji ke raaj mein Aam Aadmi ki bhi pragati ho gayi (Even Aam Aadmi has flourished in Modi’s rule),” he said mockingly. The strategy and message was clear: Kejriwal was a threat and he had to be brought down. The party could afford no distractions.

Many in the AAP admit that Bedi’s announcement as the BJP’s face did distract them initially. “She was someone with a largely clean image, so corruption wasn’t something we could target her with. There were many brainstorming sessions and we decided that the best line of attack was to largely concentrate on her decision to join the BJP,” says an AAP strategist.

In discussions within the party, the AAP decided to avoid personal attacks while making it a point to take her on for her “opportunism”. “Every day, especially after the Modi rally, our spokespersons had driven home the point that the Prime Minister had resorted to personal attacks on our leader, calling him a Naxal, while we kept talking about bijli, paani, housing. Obviously, we could not attack Bedi personally.But what we could do is question the timing of her joining the BJP. She did not join after the last Assembly elections or after the Lok Sabha polls, but just before this election, when she was assured she would be named CM candidate,” says a leader.

AAP leaders say after the initial anxiety that Bedi’s joining had caused, they were also happy at the turn of events because Kejriwal could now be compared to someone other than Modi. Until then, the AAP, which was fighting the election on local issues, needed a local face to take on and the party, almost unilaterally, announced Jagdish Mukhi as Kejriwal’s opponent in the BJP.

“We have always believed that Arvind Kejriwal is best at confrontational politics. First, we tried to make it a Kejriwal versus Jagdish Mukhi fight and there was no official denial. Now we have Kiran Bedi and we will attack her opportunism. She chose Krishna Nagar, the safest of seats, and that gave us some ammunition to attack her,” the strategist says.

Privately, AAP leaders admit that the challenge would have been greater if the BJP had fielded Bedi from New Delhi. “In party discussions, we talked about how to deal with that. That would have sent out a message that here was a candidate willing to take on Arvind Kejriwal. But at Amit Shah’s press conference, he said Krishna Nagar had been picked because it was a traditional seat. We could now say she was afraid,” says an AAP leader.

The constant churning within the BJP also gave the AAP room to continue publicising their “achievements” during their 49-day rule in Delhi. “People can see that the BJP has nothing positive to offer. All their statements and their radio advertisements target Arvind personally. We have a positive gameplan, with a white paper on water and ideas on power. The other side is bereft of ideas,” says Pankaj Gupta, a member of the AAP’s national executive.

Kejriwal largely sticks to his line in the two or three jansabhas he attends in a day. In every speech, lasting a little more than 15 minutes each, he spends less than a minute on Bedi and the rest on “humaari 49-day sarkaar”.

Churning on the ground

Shah, who had success with his strategy of using booth-level workers and panna pramukhs (booth in-charges) to rally voters in key constituencies such as Varanasi and elsewhere in Uttar Pradesh, turned to them in Delhi too. While some district leaders said that the meetings with panna pramukhs were a success, there were also those who said that the cadre needed to generate funds for such meetings and, with their local leaders sidelined, there was no incentive to raise finances. A senior leader working with the cadre said, “It took me two days to request the cadre to meet their candidate. The party workers were angry. A senior even had to tell the cadre at a public meeting that they should respect the high command’s decision and vote for Modi.”

Other BJP leaders spoke of how resentment over ticket distribution had led to many of them working outside their constituencies. “I belong to another constituency but I am working for someone else. Like me, many senior BJP leaders are only working because we consider it our duty,” says a district-level BJP worker.

Some admit that the “aggressiveness” of the Lok Sabha campaign is now missing and they have been working only because the message has “come from above”. “After all, why should one become the villain now, when we have worked for so long for the party?” says a BJP leader. Others are apprehensive that despite working for Bedi, “she will not listen to workers” after a victory.

But the AAP is listening in closely. It wants its volunteers to go on door-to-door campaigns to talk to people about Bedi’s reluctance to debate “issues important to Delhi”. “Our volunteers have a pamphlet that lists what the party has to offer — on water, power, housing and so on. We also tell them to question why Bedi has refused to come out and hold a debate with Kejriwal, and how that is an obvious sign of fear,” says a party leader.

The AAP, which has a strong presence on social media, has used it to good effect too. “The BJP’s social media team has been portraying Bedi as this ‘Iron Lady’ and that gained some traction initially. But television interviews of Bedi have brought out the lack of a constructive plan for Delhi and her lack of knowledge of key issues,” says an AAP member. The party’s army of social media volunteers was quick to post videos of Bedi seemingly walking away from an interview on Times Now and started a hashtag calling her “I-run-lady”.

Who’s in control?

These days, 14, Pant Marg, the BJP state office, has been taken over by the party’s national leaders. They are the ones who arrive at 11 am while state unit chief Satish Upadhyay has been arriving as late as 2 pm. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is effectively in charge of the Delhi unit and sits in Upadhyay’s office, where he holds daily interactions with the national media, while Union minister Nirmala Sitharaman has been given charge of the media cell.

All this hasn’t gone down too well with state BJP leaders, who were once in the running to be the CM candidate. Many say they were offended at Bedi “talking like a chief minister” even before her announcement as the party’s face. Only Vijay Goel enthusiastically tweeted about Bedi being the CM-designate.

“The worst enemies became friends. Before she was announced the CM candidate, Bedi started asserting herself. This offended many in the party brass,” says a leader. Even before she was declared the CM candidate, Bedi, for instance, called a meeting of councillors and MPs at her residence. Union minister Harsh Vardhan skipped the meeting and reached only after the event had ended. Emerging out of the meeting with Bedi, a leader said, “We are worried about our role in Delhi after February 10 (the day of the results).”

The AAP leadership, on the other hand, was quick to portray Bedi as a tragic hero, the fall guy in the case of a loss for the BJP. At the party’s Delhi Dialogue jansabha at Patparganj last Wednesday, the loudest cheer during Kejriwal’s 19-minute speech was when he said, “When they lose, they will say Kiran Bedi lost.”

Before that in his speech, he had attacked Modi and his promises and many in the crowd seemed to disagree with him. “He is wrong, Modi should be given time,” a man in the crowd said. Soon though, when Kejriwal brought out his practised apology for resigning by saying, “Galti kari, par gunah nahi kiya (we made a mistake by resigning, but it wasn’t a crime)”, they seemed to be back on his side.

“We have to admit that Modi is popular, but now people are comparing Kejriwal with Bedi,” says a senior AAP leader.

With a week still left for the election, and the BJP’s entire machinery in Delhi and Kejriwal and his colleagues fanning out across the city, much can change. One thing is clear, though: the gloves are off.

 src:http://indianexpress.com/

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