Surveys conducted by the Aam Aadmi Party had shown that the party would win all seven Lok Sabha seats in the Capital without an alliance with the Congress, AAP national convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Tuesday.
But when asked whether AAP would consider an alliance if the Congress approached it, Mr. Kejriwal said: “That is a theoretical question”.
Mr. Kejriwal was addressing a press conference at the AAP office here about the party’s main campaign flank for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections — the demand for full statehood for Delhi.
When Delhiites vote on May 12, Mr. Kejriwal said they would choose AAP as they support the demand for statehood, on which the BJP and the Congress had “betrayed” them in the past.
“The upcoming Lok Sabha elections are very important for Delhiites. Till now, Delhiites voted in order to elect a Prime Minister. This time they they will vote for AAP to support full statehood. For the past 70 years, there has been injustice and disrespect done to Delhiites,” he said.
When asked about a potential alliance between AAP and the Congress, something which he has said in the past that AAP was ready for, he said: “I have the same information that the media has”, referring to Delhi Congress president Sheila Dikshit’s public statements that there would be no tie-up between the parties.
Good margin
“In the past week, our internal survey has shown that Delhiites will vote for full statehood and that AAP is winning with a good margin, without the Congress,” Mr. Kejriwal said.
This, he said, was due to four reasons, according to the findings of a survey done on March 5 and March 6. First, he said, was the spree of inaugurations of road and drainage projects in unauthorised colonies undertaken by the Delhi government in the past two months, which the residents of these colonies were “very happy” with.
Then, he added, Delhiites had understood that the BJP and the Congress had deceived them by promising full statehood, but had not acted on it.
Mr. Kejriwal said another reason was that the BJP’s “conduct” with regard to the “tension between India and Pakistan”, which 56% of respondents in the AAP survey said would be “negative” for the party.
He claimed that Muslims would support AAP since “the Congress did not put the country first”, by not tying up with AAP to prevent a split of anti-BJP votes.
