Starting Monday, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will be releasing separate manifestos for each of the 29 seats it will be contesting in the Gujarat Assembly elections later this month. Gopal Rai, convenor of AAP’s Gujarat unit, on Saturday said the manifestos had been put together after conducting door-to-door outreach in the constituencies, as was done for the Delhi Assembly elections in 2015.
Contesting 29 out of the 182 seats in the Gujarat Assembly, Mr. Rai said the party was seeing these elections as a stepping stone.
“These elections and then the subsequent ones in Maharashtra, Rajasthan and others are purely to grow or strengthen the organisation of the party in those states,” he said, when asked whether the AAP's national growth had been curtailed after losses in Punjab and Goa earlier this year.
Though AAP national convenor and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had on November 26 appealed to Gujarat voters to chose any party other than the incumbent BJP, Mr. Rai dismissed the notion that it was an indirect call to support the Congress.
“People can make of it what they want. We are expecting a direct fight with the BJP in 10 of the constituencies and a three-way fight with the Congress in the others. Where the Congress is in the fray, people are looking for an alternative and are not natural Congress voters,” said Mr. Rai.
The 10 constituencies Mr. Rai said the AAP was up against the BJP included Unjha, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is from.
Marking a contrast from the AAP’s high-pitched campaigns in Delhi and Punjab, where large meetings and an influx of volunteers were seen, Mr. Rai said the plan was to focus on local-level events.
“Apart from talking about our work in Delhi, we are holding nukkad sabhas and focusing on grassroots-level campaigning unlike the other parties,” said Mr. Rai.
Of the party's 29 candidates, most are contesting elections for the first time, he said. If they win, Mr. Rai said the party's MLAs would work to set up their constituencies as “model Vidhan Sabhas”, which would serve as examples for voters going forward. He added that the party would raise the issue of attacks on dalits and patidars in the Gujarat Assembly, which, he said, had so far ignored the incidents.
