Badmouthing Arvind Kejriwal appears to have boomeranged on the BJP in Delhi. From advertisements making fun of the ‘Bhagora’ to Prime Minister Narendra Modi gratuitously describing him as a ‘Naxalite’ and asking him to retreat to a jungle and BJP spokesmen on TV dismissing the AAP leader as of no consequence do not seem to have gone down well with voters. That is why, with barely a week to go before campaigning comes to an end for the February 7 election, BJP is suddenly perceived to be fighting with its back to the wall.
The BJP's bombastic announcements of deploying union ministers to campaign in Delhi, putting finance minister Arun Jaitley to coordinate the exercise at a time when he should have been busy giving finishing touches to the union budget, increasingly come across as desperate moves. Jaitley has never contested an election from Delhi and lost when he contested from Amritsar in the general election. While the Prime Minister may address one or two more public rallies (he has been to one already) his failure to address the seven rallies planned originally is unlikely to send the signal that the party is sanguine about winning the election.
It can now be said that the announcement of Kiran Bedi as its chief ministerial candidate on January 19, hailed as a masterstroke of Amit Shah by no less a person than former law minister and AAP mentor Shanti Bhushan, is already being regretted by the party. Bedi herself did not help matters by claiming that she had found the world’s most beautiful face in Narendra Modi and that Kejriwal should join BJP to get an invitation for the Republic Day parade.
Bedi’s refusal to engage in a public debate with Kejriwal and her hurried exit from a TV studio were not taken too kindly by BJP supporters. She struck an awkward note on the day she was inducted into the party by declaring that she herself would start working at 9 am sharp and she would expect "my secretaries" to do likewise. She flaunted two files on TV, one marked ‘Governance’ and the other marked ‘Modi’ and claimed that she had been studying both for some time and was therefore more than eligible to be the chief minister.
Every passing day embarrassing details about the Magsaysay winner kept tumbling out of the cupboard. Julio Ribeiro, another decorated police officer, wrote in DNA that when he called up Bedi to congratulate her on winning the award, she invited him to join the trust she planned to set up with the award money. He readily agreed but never heard from Bedi, wrote Ribeiro. Indeed he was not even aware that he was actually a trustee because he was never informed or invited to attend any meeting till TV crews landed up at his doorstep for sound bites when Bedi was accused of flying economy class but insisting on Business Class airfare from her hosts. As Bedi lurched from one PR disaster to another, BJP seemed to be losing the plot.
It came as no surprise therefore when two reports in quick succession on Thursday posted in Firstpost, a news portal, created a buzz online. The headline of the first report read: AAP May Be Headed for a Landslide in Delhi.
The headline of the second report was even more sensational. It read: Not Just Bedi: Five Reasons Why BJP May Not Win in Delhi. Earlier in the morning Hindustan Times carried a report on an opinion poll conducted for it and claimed that BJP and AAP were headed for a tie in a close finish with both parties likely to win 31 to 36 seats each in the 70-member assembly.
The reports were interesting because despite its chief ministerial candidate getting slammed for being economical with the truth, the BJP was widely perceived to be the frontrunner. It had plastered the national capital with its hoardings (though AAP was smarter in booking many of the more strategic places earlier). It was obviously spending a lot more on FM radio spots often caricaturing AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal. According to one estimate, BJP had mobilized 200,000 people including RSS whole-timers to campaign for it. And finally Narendra Modi was expected to make a huge difference with the middle class voters still enamored of the strong leader.
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BJP obviously took Delhi for granted. It has been a traditional stronghold of the party. BJP has an alliance with Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), which enjoys considerable appeal among Sikh voters. And of course it was the single-largest party with 32 seats when elections were held last in December, 2013. AAP with 28 seats went on to form a government for 49 days but it was the BJP which had reasons to feel smug, especially after it swept all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi in the general elections five months later.
In hindsight the party would be regretting its cockiness if at all the doomsday predictions come true. It was undoubtedly cavalier the way the party first projected Dr Harshvardhan as its chief ministerial candidate in Delhi, then fielded him for the Lok Sabha, made him the health minister and then sidelined him unceremoniously to the Science & Technology minister. This time round when it dawned on the party that it did not have a known face to counter Arvind Kejriwal, it fell back on Kiran Bedi, a popular but controversial figure in Delhi and a former colleague of Kejriwal in India Against Corruption (IAC). The party also welcomed several other 'defectors' from Congress and AAP like former union minister Krishna Tirath, AAP MLAs Vinay Kumar Binny and MS Dhir, former Kejriwal associate Shazia Ilmi and others, fielding half a dozen 'defectors' while ignoring its own state leaders.
