The poster war between the Aam Aadmi Party and the BJP— aimed at questioning everything from each other’s claim to form the next government in the Capital to the capability of their respective leaderships — went up a notch here on Saturday.
A few days ago, the AAP had installed hoardings, bearing New Year greetings for seven BJP Chief Ministerial candidates. Now, BJP West Delhi MP Parvesh Verma sought to offer New Year’s greetings to the AAP on hoardings, naming 11 of its founding members as potential Delhi Chief Ministers who were “chucked out” from the party.
Sunil Yadav, president of the Delhi BJP’s youth wing — Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BYJM) — installed hoardings, attacking Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, at 25 prominent flyovers in the city. This is a “symbolic protest” seeking to “expose” Kejriwal’s “lies” on several issues, Mr. Yadav said.
Hoarding grabs eyeballs
One of the dozen hoardings across the city, bearing both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Mr. Kejriwal’s faces, garnered muchinterest.
The hoarding, supposedly installed by an individual — Deepak Madan — who is associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the Bajrang Dal and the BJP, sought to argue that while the “country wants Modi”, the people of the Capital “want Kejriwal.”
A picture of the hoarding was first put out by Abhishek Gupta from AAP’s national social media team on Twitter on Friday evening following which it was shared by the party’s spokesperson Saurabh Bharadwaj.
AAP takes to Twitter
Mr. Gupta’s postwas captioned as: “When those from the RSS and the BJP’s own workers start saying ‘Dilli Mein to Kejriwal’ you can gauge which way the wind is blowing [sic].”
“Yes, I have put up the hoarding. Thirteen of them have been installed at several locations in Delhi till now and one more will be put up by tomorrow. If one speaks from the heart, there is no denying that Kejriwal has done a lot of good work for the city. However, that may not be the official line of the party one is associated with,” Mr. Madan told The Hindu. He also said: “I have been with the RSS since I childhood and then got associated with the Bajrang Dal of which I am a member. I am now the Paschim Vihar Mandal president of the BJP. But let me clarify, the hoardings say what I feel in a personal capacity.”
Whodunnit
Meanwhile, the BJP claimed Mr. Madan had “nothing to do with it and was certainly not an office-bearer” of its State unit. This, even as an AAP insider said similar hoardings, claiming that outfits associated with the BJP were in support of Mr. Kejriwal, had emerged prior to the Delhi Assembly Elections in 2015.
A BJP source said: “This is clearly an attempt by AAP to try and confuse voters with elections around the corner, to portray that the BJP has no confidence in its leadership. It is a ploy which is both sad and desperate.”
In response to this, an AAP insider said: “The onus of proving whether the person who installed the hoardings belongs to the RSS or the BJP is on them; it is not our prerogative.”
