Over 1.45 crore electors will decide the fate of 1,349 candidates today as the Capital keeps its date with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections. The voting commences at 8 a.m. and closes at 5.30 p.m.
This will be the city’s first civic polls since the merger of the three erstwhile municipal corporations — North, South and East — in May, and after the total number of municipal wards were reduced to 250 from the previous total of 272.
High-stakes poll
The high-stakes poll is largely being perceived as a two-way contest between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), while the Congress looks to throw a surprise or two.
While merely a civic poll, it has assumed greater significance given the backdrop of AAP foraying into Gujarat in a bid to extend its presence beyond Delhi and Punjab and the BJP looking to clip its wings where the party sprang from.
The run-up to the polls witnessed large-scale aggressive campaigns which included numerous roadshows andnukkad sabhas by both AAP as well as the BJP, which concluded on Sunday.
The BJP consistently deployed big names from its national and State leadership – the likes of party national president J.P. Nadda and Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma – to levy allegations of corruption, paired with theatrics, against AAP.
AAP has maintained its stance of being “kattar imandaar” (honest to the core) and mounted its campaign on civic issues revolving around waste management, the city’s three landfills and the MCD’s poor finances that they claim were largely ignored by the BJP during the latter’s 15-year term in the civic body.
The Congress, according to its senior leader and former Delhi Mayor Farhad Suri, is betting on the return of its “traditional voters who moved towards AAP”.
In the 2017 civic polls, the BJP secured 181 out of the 272 seats in the three erstwhile municipal corporations. With AAP making its then-debut in the civic polls and securing 49 seats, the Congress saw its seat share drop to 31 from 77 in the 2012 civic poll.
Out of the 104 wards each in the erstwhile North and South corporations, the BJP secured 64 and 70 seats; it won 47 out of the 64 wards in the East corporation.
While the elections to the three erstwhile corporations were originally scheduled to be held in April, they were cancelled after the Centre conveyed its decision to merge the three civic bodies just hours before the State Election Commission (SEC) Delhi’s announcement of the poll dates.
SEC arrangements
For polling day, the SEC has ensured elaborate arrangements on ground, with 3,360 booths in 493 locations being identified as ‘critical’ or ‘sensitive’; these are the first civic polls taking place since the 2020 north-east Delhi riots.
A total of 13,638 polling stations are in place across the city for the 1.45 crore voters, which include 95,458 first-time voters. Of the total voters, the total number of male voters stands at over 78 lakh, followed by over 66 lakh female voters and 1,061 third gender voters.
Out of the 1.34 crore voters in the 2017 civic polls, the turnout remained low at only 53%, a figure that the SEC hopes will improve in this year’s poll.
