New Delhi: Delhi chief minister and the chief of Aam Aadmi Party Arvind Kejriwal said his party’s campaign for the election next month will be focussed on seeking ‘positive vote’ on the back of its last five years of performance, soon after the Election Commission announced the date for polling in the capital.
Kejriwal boasted that it would be the first time in India’s seven decades of democracy that a chief minister was asking for votes on the basis of their previous performance. He said people had the option of comparing the departments that are under BJP control – Police, municipalities and Delhi Development Authority – with the work done by AAP in areas like education, health and in providing essential services like electricity and water.
“People don’t want Delhi to turn into another MCD. We want to appeal to all the voters ‘vote for us only if you’re satisfied with the work that we have done over the past five years’. To say something like this, before polls, takes a lot of guts. We are making this statement on the basis of the work we have done over the past five years,” Kejriwal said.
Attacking BJP president and union home minister Amit Shah over his recent poll rally in the capital, Kejriwal expressed surprise over suggestions that the poll contest would be between him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he strived to keep the talk focused on work and not make it a personality contest.
“The PM will not abandon his seat to become CM. I don't see how it happens,” he said.
Shah had on Sunday said that the BJP would contest the election under the leadership of Modi, and the party has decided not to name a CM face for the election.
Kejriwal said that as a chief minister of the capital he heard Shah’s whole speech, “but instead of a vision for the capital, or any helpful criticism I only found a lot of abuses hurled at me. The fact that BJP and Congress leaders have not been able to find faults with our schemes and development works, and are only abusing me, means that secretly they’re also happy with our work,” Kejriwal said.
He said that AAP volunteers who would now go door-to-door to seek votes in the capital would also visit houses of Congress and BJP workers. “We did not discriminate when extending essential services or building hospitals or building schools for the capital. No Congress or BJP worker was left out of any development scheme, which is why we will appeal to party members of other parties also to vote for us this time,” he said.
Addressing a press conference in the backdrop of his party’s poll slogan for the upcoming elections ‘Lage raho Kejriwal’, he said, “Pichli baar logon ne record banaya tha, is baar log man bana chuke hain [Last time people gave us a record mandate, this time people have decided to do that again].”
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