New Delhi: Political strategist Prashant Kishor, who was the man behind Narendra Modi’s successful electioneering campaign when he was the prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, has now joined hands with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
Delhi chief minister and AAP founder Arvind Kejriwal announced on Saturday that Kishor’s political advocacy group, Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC), would now be providing an image makeover to his party ahead of the Delhi assembly elections.
Incidentally, AAP and IPAC were on opposite sides of the political divide during the Punjab assembly elections of 2017 when the latter had worked on the Congress campaign in both Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.
Recalling that moment, the advocacy group responded to Kejriwal’s message.
The coming together of the two groups assumes significance as the Delhi polls are barely two months away. In the 2015 elections, AAP had trounced the two traditional contenders of Delhi politics – the Congress and BJP. The party had polled 54.5% votes and bagged a record 67 of the 70 assembly seats. The term of the current assembly comes to an end on February 14, 2020, by which time the poll process is supposed to end.
This time too, AAP wants to repeat its sterling performance of 2015. Though the BJP, as in 2014, once again managed to win all the seven Lok Sabha seats of Delhi in the 2019 general elections, AAP believes the voters vote differently in different polls and now is the party’s moment under the sun.
However, the BJP is approaching these elections with a different strategy. It has realised that announcing the chief ministerial candidate does not always help in politics. So this time it has not gone ahead and announced a name. The party is of the view that this strategy succeeded in the Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand polls in the past, and could work in Delhi as well.
Also read: How Real Are AAP’s Chances in the Delhi Assembly Elections?
Another difference is that while in the past, AAP has gone into the Delhi elections accusing other parties of corruption or incompetence, this time it will give an account of its five-year rule.
It is here that the services of Kishor, who in the past has successfully steered the campaigns of Modi during Lok Sabha polls, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) in the Bihar polls of 2015 and Andhra Pradesh chief minister Jaganmohan Reddy during the state polls earlier this year, could come in handy.
By allying with AAP, Kishor has also demonstrated once again that he is a man of his own calling, for right now he is vice-president of the JD(U), which is an ally of the BJP at the Centre and in Bihar. This is not new – his organisation IPAC earlier also took up the re-election campaign of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress for the 2021 polls.
Another interesting development that came on the eve of the AAP-IPAC deal is that after a long time, AAP decided to oppose the Centre on a critical policy decision. After supporting the Modi government on the Balakot airstrikes and the reading down of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, it has criticised the Citizenship (Amendment) Act just the way Kishor did recently, despite JD(U) supporting it in parliament.