On a cold winter evening in early December, a white SUV drove into a small clearing in Jailerwala Bagh in North-West Delhi’s Keshavpuram with a ‘Member of Parliament’ sticker on the windshield. The area residents, who were huddled under thick blankets, looked up as BJP MP from Bahraich Sadhvi Savitri Phule got down from the car and walked towards the makeshift stage that had come up only an hour ago.
Ms. Phule arrived nearly an hour and a half later than she was scheduled to speak and the local kids had taken the opportunity to fashion rockets out of the BJP’s brochures and let it fly, most crashing into an adult’s head. Dressed in saffron clothes, the BJP MP’s address was filled with references to the pro-poor schemes announced by the Narendra Modi government and the “great work” done by the Central government in the last six months.
The BJP’s Central leadership had warned MPs to stay away from controversial statements like the one Union Minister of State Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti had made in the beginning of December. Ms. Jyoti’s statement stalled Parliament, left the party red-faced and set the tone for the BJP’s ‘nukkad sabhas’ in the Capital from day one.
Yet, the MPs seemed to also stay away from local context. The poorly-lit approach road to the meeting venue, the numerous women and children who were openly defecating due to lack of functional toilets and the fact that the area looked untouched by the ‘Swacchh Bharat Mission’ were issues Ms. Phule did not make even a passing reference to.
The BJP’s plan was to get nearly 300 MPs from across the country to woo people from their community here in the Capital. But between December 1 and December 20, the party managed to get only one-third the strength of MPs, some of them Union Ministers, to speak at the 900-odd corner meetings, with all the big names giving it a miss.
According to the party, many of its MPs could not be utilised for these meetings due to language problems. BJP president Amit Shah had in November directed the Delhi BJP to hold a ‘nukkad sabha’ at 2,700 polling booths. However, a senior BJP leader said the target was reduced to 1,350 as there are around three polling centres in every village and it was difficult for an MP to hold these nukkad sabhas at every polling centre of the same village. “Some MPs even complained that they felt embarrassed to address a very small crowd of people who had gathered at a nukkad sabha,” said the leader.
In some constituencies, ‘Radha-Krishna jhankis’ were organised to hold the crowd’s attention before MPs showed up to speak, sometimes drawing more attention from residents than the speech itself. Apart from singing Mr. Modi’s praises, who has in the last week appeared in photos of bus shelters and hoardings asking for Delhi’s vote, the party high command had given the MPs one more instruction: to take a potshot at the Aam Aadmi Party. “A BJP government will not run away,” was a common statement made across the city in the first twenty days of December.
