Farhana Anjum, the Aam Aadmi Party candidate from Ballimaran constituency, is up for a challenging contest this upcoming election. She is contesting against three-time Congress MLA Haroon Yusuf who is also a State Minister.
Ms. Anjum, who is the only Muslim woman to have applied from the area, says corruption is a big issue for her which made her join the AAP. Last time she fought the municipal elections and lost by 200 votes, but this time she is neither perturbed nor nervous.
Ms. Anjum along with Rakhi Birla, who is contesting from the Mangolpuri constituency, are among the faces that the party has fielded to woo women voters. As many as seven out of the 63 candidates announced are women and the party is expected to declare some more women candidates.
The AAP is in no mood to ignore women. It has formed an informal committee of women members which will not only discuss women’s issues to be taken up by the party but will also mobilise support for the party among other women.
The party which has been prominently raising issues related to women, says it felt the need for a separate women's wing as they would have much easier access to homes during their door-to-door campaigns.
“At present, a large number of AAP volunteers are women but by setting up a dedicated women’s wing in each constituency we want to expand our support base,” said AAP spokesperson Aswathi Muralidharan, adding that a team of around 25 members has been identified to chalk out the details on how to go about it.
Very soon teams at ward and Assembly levels will be formed along with the central committee for the entire city.
The AAP women candidates, on the other hand are gearing for elections and are busy giving last minute touches to their campaign.
Shazia Ilmi, a former TV anchor who is contesting from the R.K. Puram Assembly constituency, is among the best recognised AAP candidates. Going by conventional political wisdom, Ms. Ilimi ought to have been a candidate from one of the constituencies with dominant Muslim population like Matia Mahal, Ballimaran and Okhla.
Her claim to fame is not her Muslim name but the fact that she is fighting election from an area which predominantly consists of Hindus, with Muslims forming around four per cent of the electorate. Many saw the instance as defying vote bank politics. She is taking on sitting Congress MLA Barkha Singh.
Ms. Ilmi, an alumna of the University of Wales, Cardiff, believes larger issues are affecting smaller issues of governance. She claims once corruption, the main plank of her party, is taken care of, money will reach the people on the ground. At present, nobody knows where most of the money spent on the projects has gone.
“What the AAP is trying to bring about is swaraj. We want people to have a stake in deciding how to spend the MLA fund,” she says.
Confident of people’s support, 26-year-old Rakhi, who is contesting against three-time Congress MLA Raj Kumar Chauhan, seems undeterred. She argues corruption is a big issue because it affects price rise. “People are quite powerful and they are fed up with the corruption of the Congress government. The AAP has emerged as an alternative to them,” she says.
She is fighting from a seat reserved for Dalits. Traditionally, the 12 reserved seats in Delhi have been a bastion of the Bahujan Samaj Party. But the AAP claims, loyalties are shifting.
Party leader and psephologist Yogendra Yadav asserted that the BSP as a party has sunk in Delhi and a large chunk of its vote base has switched to the AAP.
He also argues that Dalits are mobilising around the AAP, going beyond their caste identity, because the party has raised citizen centric issues affecting everybody.
This article has been corrected for a factual error.
