The results of the Delhi Assembly elections, slated now for February 7 after the Election Commission announced the poll dates on Monday, could well determine the future of the Modi government.
If the BJP gets a simple majority, it can breathe easy; but if it fails to improve on last year’s results, when it emerged as single largest party but was unable to form a government, it will have a re-invigorated Aam Aadmi Party at its throat, underscoring the fact that the BJP has failed to bring down prices or make the national capital any safer for women after eight months in power.
For, unlike the other State elections held after last year’s Lok Sabha polls, this test of electoral popularity will take place in the national capital where the impact of the new government is being felt the most.
Indeed, as the BJP’s political opponents in the Congress and the AAP stress, they had expected that after Prime Minister Narendra Modi led his party to a spectacular victory in the Lok Sabha polls in May 2014, the new government would immediately recommend dissolution of the State Assembly and call for fresh elections. The BJP could, after all, be expected to ride the wave, having won all seven Lok Sabha seats in the national capital; not just that, the State had already been under President’s Rule since February that year (after AAP’s 49-day government came to an abrupt end), and continued efforts had failed to produce a viable government.
But the BJP, at that stage, believed, Congress sources said, that the party would be able to engineer a split in it, with the MLAs joining BJP ally Shiromani Akali Dal. The BJP had emerged the largest party in the Assembly elections in 2013 with 31 MLAs in the 70-seat assembly, while the SAD had got one seat — the combine needed just another four that it thought it would be able to get from the Congress. But that did not happen.
Without an effective face in Delhi, the BJP turned its attention to the other State elections — Maharashtra, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand — before Delhi, as it had time till February 2015. Evidently, it did not want to take a risk.
Then, on August 5, 2014, the Supreme Court gave five weeks' time to the Centre to take a decision on dissolution of the Delhi Assembly “one way or another”, questioning it for continuing to keep the House in suspended animation when no party was coming forward to form the government. Finally, on November 4, the Union Cabinet recommended dissolution of the Delhi Assembly, paving the way for fresh polls.
Now, the elections in Delhi are likely to be a three-way contest among the BJP, the AAP and the Congress, in which the BJP has an edge, according to a string of recent opinion polls. But with the AAP having got a second wind, it could be a neck and neck race. The BJP’s hopes now rest on the Congress doing better than it did last year when it won only eight seats, and cutting into the votes of the AAP, that won 28 seats last year.
