For AAP And BJP, The Final Battle For Delhi Is Set For February 5

Voting is on February 5. Results will be declared on February 8. The BJP put out a poster within minutes of the announcement that Delhi will have a BJP Chief Minister by mid-February. But the BJP was beaten to the claim by AAP spokesperson Priyanka Kakkar who asserted, even before the Election Commission announced the dates, that Delhi’s voters will vote to make Arvind Kejriwal Chief Minister for the fourth time, no worries.

The good thing going for this Priyanka is that Ramesh Bidhuri won’t be calling her names. The Election Commission warned that those casting slurs against women candidates and women in general will be held to account and put behind bars. Cases will be lodged against the Bidhuris of this world. Yes, what they call “Zero Tolerance”. For sure, tin-pot misogynists like Bidhuri will keep his oats shut in tin cans. Bidhuri just survived getting lynched by a couple of days.

Else, Delhi Chief Minister Atishi and Congress’ Wayanad MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra would have been celebrating Bidhuri’s punishment. The Election Commission warned male candidates and political parties to mind their language when talking about women. Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar said this, his face stern after an initial bout of ‘shero-shayari’ that, if it did regale voters, would be known only on February 5.

Delhi has a total voter strength of 1 crore 55 lakh, of which male voters account for 83.89 lakh and female voters number around 71.74 lakh. There has been an increase of 1.70m lakh voters from the last election. But there are complaints, allegations actually, that as many as 5 lakh new voters have been added to the electoral list. If that is true, there was mischief afoot and if the BJP wins, Modi and Shah will have hell to pay.

The AAP and AAP’s “loyal team of political analysts” are the source of these estimates. One thing is for certain, the EVM will have stiff competition from voter-list fraud if what’s been said is gospel. God forbid, if Arvind Kejriwal loses, which is not far-fetched. Delhi’s dust is not worth taking a bite from.

The intriguing question is will Ramesh Bidhuri be the BJP Chief Minister? Beating Delhi Chief Minister Atishi will be qualification enough. Bidhuri can always claim he had never changed his father! But Bidhuri doesn’t stand a chance. He is sick to the gills. Ramesh Bidhuri is the sort who will never let his better-half pose a question or come up with an answer. The Election Commission should have warned Ramesh Bidhuri by name, and said in no uncertain terms that the likes of Bidhuri will be banished from the electoral arena.

Call it the ‘Bidhuri Effect’. The media has got a talking point. Come evening, there will be debates on the Bidhuri Effect! The man should have got a tongue-lashing from the Prime Minister himself, for falling woefully short on language and etiquette, but the Prime Minister doesn’t waste breath on such issues. The Prime Minister has better things to do, like free flats to the jhuggi-jhopri residents.

Housing is a big issue, not just in India, Delhi, but also in Canada, when Justin Trudeau had to get off his high horse and quit being Prime Minister because he couldn’t provide housing to all the Canadians on the voters list. Prime Minister Modi if he was Canadian PM would not have lasted two full terms.

That is a guess, but if the BJP thinks handing out free flats would get for it Delhi to rule, think again. Freebies are under scrutiny and freebies don’t gel with the dream of ‘Viksit Bharat’. To think that Modi is being hailed as ‘Mahamanav’ and all he has to show are free flats doled out to slum-dwellers. The slums are taking their time going away; one set of slum-dwellers get their free flats, another set take its place in the slums.

It is never ending, whether it is free flats or five kilogram of aata, dal and chawal. Modi’s route to ‘Viksit Bharat’ isn’t by lifting people out of poverty done in the right proper time-tested manner the worldover. There should be a debate on this in the Modi TV channels, but which journo in Delhi has the guts to ask Modi about his poverty-alleviation formula?

Come most evenings, it is lying-time a.k.a primetime, that hour or two hours also called news-hour by some tv channels, which balances time between anchors to present a variety of faces than content. And big-time liars take part in these debates; fibbers and bluffers adept at sounding honest and true to the viewer even when blatantly spouting white lies through the teeth.

It is the same with everyone. From the man who runs and owns the Republic. To the fellow who is here today and tomorrow, too. The Republic fellow claims to have spoken back to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the only journalist to have done so. And when Manmohan Singh departed this universe to another, he ran down the soft-spoken Sikh with repeated renderings of the same story, of Manmohan speechless!

The others are no better. The one thing common between them is their fealty to the one and only One! Who went straight from Chief Minister to Prime Minister! You guessed it, part of the reason why the media lies and fibs and bluffs and gets away with two-timing the viewer and the reader is this man.

It is up to Arvind Kejriwal now. And AAP spokesperson Priyanka Kakkar who jumped the gun and beat both the BJP and the Congress with the next Delhi Chief Minister’s name. So, what if he happens to be her boss Arvind Kejriwal? Kakkar is a regular in TV debates and she will be there this evening and tomorrow, too, lending decibels to the fibbers and bluffers, some of whom also get paid for taking viewers for a ride into Alice’s Wonderland.

In her ‘box’ in the Idiot Box, Kakkar never wavers in training guns at the BJP; these days also at the Congress, and she said she expected a fair election and a level playing field. Looks like the Election Commission heard her and asserted there indeed will be a level playing field for a fair election. Let’s hope the Election body doesn’t give Priyanka Kakkar reason to retort “Sharam nahi aati”, which is her usual response to promises made and not kept. Spokesperson Priyanka Kakkar doesn’t leave anything to the imagination.

Arraying against other parties’ spokespersons, AAP’s Priyanka Kakkar holds her own and quite often beats them in going off on tangents when answering questions. This Priyanka’s job is to criticize the ruling party and she does it daily at the newshour. What is surprising is Priyanka Kakkar expressing “confidence in a fair election.”

Her prediction about Kejriwal’s re-election and a fourth term for Kejriwal may not come true for as long as he adheres to the bail conditions imposed on him by the Supreme Court but Kakkar wasn’t willing to be denied her say on the matter. The AAP had won 62 out of 70 seats in the 2020 assembly elections with the BJP securing eight. Will February 8 tell a different story? (IPA Service)