A prize catch or a liability, a master stroke or a mistake? In projecting new entrant >Kiran Bedi as its chief ministerial candidate in the Delhi Assembly election, the Bharatiya Janata Party must have entertained visions of beating the principal rival Aam Aadmi Party at its own game. Ms. Bedi, whose post-retirement political activism was centred on Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement, was seen as the ideal counter to Arvind Kejriwal, who too was a prominent member of Team Anna before forming the AAP. The saffron party’s strategy was to cut into the freshly built vote bank of the AAP: the aspiring middle class that had tired of the political class, perceived as corrupt and inefficient. But in leaning too heavily on a newcomer to lead the campaign, the BJP showed itself up as a party that was short of stalwarts in Delhi. After Harsh Vardhan, who was propped up as the clean, incorruptible face of the party in Delhi in the last election, moved to the Lok Sabha and then the Union Cabinet, the BJP was left without a widely acceptable leader. Whether Ms. Bedi can unite the warring factions of the BJP, or whether she would end up adding one more faction to the mix, is the big question. What is certain is that Ms. Bedi’s entry will not be smooth; she was earlier a strident critic of the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Already there are murmurs of protest at the manner in which she was made the chief ministerial candidate without broad consultations within the party.
Like Mr. Kejriwal before her, Ms. Bedi failed to >win the support of Mr. Hazare for her political ambitions. Mr. Hazare has stayed away from all political parties, but for a brief spike in interest in the Trinamool Congress. Although she was a prominent face in Team Anna, Ms. Bedi is unlikely to win the backing of all those who had joined the anti-corruption crusade behind the Gandhian at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar in 2011. She might match Mr. Kejriwal’s crusading spirit, but whether she will be able to capture the popular imagination remains to be seen. At one level, her entry — just days before the election — comes across as politically opportunist. For the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah team, Delhi is of a different order from the Assembly polls held after the Lok Sabha election. Here the BJP has no ally to shed, and there can be no excuse for falling short of an absolute majority. Anything short of a majority will likely be seen as a failure, and not as the success of a bold experiment of going it alone. In that sense, Delhi will be a greater test than Maharashtra or Haryana or Jharkhand. How far Ms. Bedi, who is expected to turn the campaign into a direct contest between her and Mr. Kejriwal, will help the BJP in this endeavour, remains to be seen.
