On Sunday, during its first party workers’ convention after the loss in the Lok Sabha polls, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) launched a new slogan — ‘Kejriwal in Delhi’ — to gear up for the upcoming assembly polls in the city.
The convention, organised at a lawn in west Delhi’s Punjabi Bagh, was attended by hundreds of party workers from across the city.
The slogan was officially launched by senior AAP leader and the party’s Delhi convener Gopal Rai. “We have contested so many elections but why did we get such less vote share this year? The reason is that the election was not fought over issues at all. Forget what happened in the general elections. When it comes to Delhi, people across the city want Arvind Kejriwal as their leader. Our slogan for the assembly elections should be Kejriwal in Delhi.”
In the 2015 assembly elections, AAP had achieved a landslide win. The AAP had won a record 67 seats out of 70.
On Sunday’s convention, resentment was also visible among large segments of party workers. Many of them were divided over the issue of alliance talks between the AAP and the Congress ahead of the polls which did not materialise in the end.
“It was Kejriwal who had finished the Congress off in 2013, and it was again Kejriwal who brought back the Congress in 2019,” said Gaurav Bhati, an AAP worker from Tughlakabad in South Delhi, expressing angst over the alliance talks.
S C Jain, a party worker from west Delhi’s Paschim Vihar, said, “It’s neither the alliance talk nor the statements. There was a Modi wave and no issue in the world could combat that. The idea of the alliance in the first place was to defeat the Modi-Shah duo.”
Later, Gopal Rai said: “The alliance talk on our part was an attempt to take on a fascist power. This was a compromise which we shall never repeat. From now on we shall fight on our own, and win on our own.”
First Published:
May 27, 2019 02:45 IST
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