The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is contesting all 90 Assembly seats in Haryana for the first time, has got a shot in the arm with its national convenor and Delhi Chief Minister Aravind Kejriwal getting bail from the Supreme Court on Friday
With the state going to polls on October 5, party workers are “extremely excited” to have him with them. The ruling BJP and AAP are the only two parties contesting all 90 seats without an alliance with any other party.
Congress contested in alliance with CPM and allotted one seat for CPM. Two major alliances are also in the fray. They are the INLD-BSP,HLP alliance and the JJP- ASP (Kanshi Ram) alliance.
Kejriwal tops the list of AAP’s star campaigners in Haryana. A native of Haryana’s Bhiwani district, he had earlier campaigned for party candidate and state president Dr Sushil Gupta in Kurukshetra. Gupta got over 5.3 lakh votes in the Kurukshetra Lok Sabha constituency as an INDIA bloc candidate. He, however, lost to BJP’s Naveen Jindal.
Presently, Kejriwal’s wife Sunita, Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha and Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann have been leading the party’s campaign in the state.
AAP’s Haryana unit chief Sushil Gupta said Mr Kejriwal would campaign in the state, adding that the people are looking for a change. “We will now fight the polls with double energy. Kejriwal ji will soon start his campaign in Haryana,” he said.
While the AAP had lost the lone Lok Sabha seat – Kurukshetra – it had contested by a margin of 29,000 votes, the party believes it can do well because it is in power in Delhi and Punjab, two states that border Haryana, where, its leaders claim, people are happy with its policies.
Along these lines, campaigning in the Asandh Assembly constituency on Thursday, AAP Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha had made a “triple-engine” pitch for development.
“On one side of Haryana there’s Punjab which has an AAP government and on the other side there’s Delhi with an AAP government too. If the AAP government is formed in Haryana then a triple engine of development will run in the state,” he had said.
