A performer walks along a road wearing a vest with a picture of Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, during a campaign rally in Kolkata yesterday. The Gujarat chief minister is the front runner to be the prime minister. But even a small clutch of seats for the new Aam Aadmi Party could be enough to deny Modi a chance at forming a government.
Agencies/New Delhi
The young anti-graft party that stormed to power in Delhi last month plans to field at least 73 candidates in national elections due by May to stand against politicians accused of crimes, its founder said.
Following its strong performance in Delhi, interest in the year-old Aam Aadmi Party has surged. Since an announcement earlier this month that it would contest the general election, its membership has passed 10mn.
Until now the party had not said how many of the 540 Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) seats it might contest in an election pitting the ruling Congress Party-led coalition against front runner opposition candidate Narendra Modi.
While polls suggest the debutant party is unlikely to win more than a dozen or so seats, its success in Delhi has shaken up the national race, with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and the ruling Congress both aping AAP’s anti-elite, anti-corruption language.
Even a small clutch of seats for the Aam Aadmi Party could be enough to deny Modi a chance at forming a government, and give AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal a say in national policy.
The AAP will put up candidates in constituencies of 73 members of parliament who face serious criminal charges. Candidates will also stand for the seats of central government ministers which the party believes are corrupt, Kejriwal said.
“The most important thing is there are a large number of cabinet ministers who have indulged in corruption, they need to be defeated,” Kejriwal said.
“There are nearly 162 people in Lok Sabha who have criminal charges against them and there are 73 out of them who have serious charges against them. They need to be defeated, we will put up strong candidates against them,” said Kejriwal, who was sworn in as Delhi chief minister on December 28.
He did not say how many, or which, government ministers would be a target.
Indian voters are notorious for rewarding candidates with criminal accusations against them. Politicians accused of crimes had a higher success rate than others in the last parliamentary election in 2009.
“It is for the people to decide if they want to support clean politics or not. Earlier the people used to say they didn’t have an option, now we will provide them with a clean option,” Kejriwal said.
The party, meanwhile, has set up an election war room in Lucknow, a party official said.
The state secretariat, as it is called, will double up as AAP’s office and the strategy room where party workers and leaders will brainstorm on the forthcoming elections.
An IVR (interactive voice response) system and computers are being set up in the war room for storing the electoral history and other information of all the parliamentary constituencies in Uttar Pradesh, Vaibhav Maheshwari, a member of the state secretariat, said.
Party leader Sanjay Singh on Monday announced the setting up of a co-ordination committee and a state secretariat.
Singh, a close associate of Kejriwal, said the party would contest all 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh and 350 Lok Sabha seats throughout the country.
I would have asked BJP to back AAP: Ramdev
“I would have engineered an AAP-BJP coalition in Delhi had Arvind Kejriwal come to me for advice,” yoga guru Baba Ramdev said yesterday. Ramdev said the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi was the best leader on India’s contemporary political canvas. He described Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi as a failure and Aad Aadmi Party leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal as a turncoat. Kejriwal, Ramdev said, lagged far behind other regional leaders like J Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee and Navin Patnaik. “If he had asked me at that time, we would have asked the BJP to support him,” Ramdev said. The AAP came second in the Delhi assembly polls after the BJP and took power after receiving outside support from the Congress.