Haryana, August 21: Even though Haryana is the home state of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convener Arvind Kejriwal, his party has not had much luck in the Lok Sabha or Assembly elections. The AAP intends to run for at least 27 seats along the Punjab-Haryana border in the Assembly elections on October 1 in an attempt to change that.
It aspires to garner enough support to become a “third force” in a state where the opposition Congress and the ruling BJP hold sway.
The AAP is still without a seat in the state’s 90-member Assembly after entering the Haryana Assembly elections for the first time in 2019. As a member of the Opposition INDIA alliance and a Congress ally, the party contested only one seat in the just finished Lok Sabha elections, Kurukshetra. But its candidate, Sushil Gupta, lost to the BJP’s Naveen Jindal by a narrow margin of 29,021 votes.
Despite the setback in the Lok Sabha, the AAP is optimistic that, having gained power in neighboring Punjab, the upcoming Assembly elections will be different. For this reason, there are plans to run for all 90 Haryana Assembly seats, with a particular emphasis on those that border the state.
The AAP ran for 46 seats in the 2019 Assembly, but it did not win any of them. The None of the Above (NOTA) option received 0.53% of the vote overall, BUT AAP’s vote share was merely 0.48%. With less than a thousand votes, the majority of AAP candidates lost their security deposits.
One such seat, Pehowa, from where Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann’s wife Gurpreet belong, is one in which the AAP has great expectations. In Haryana, during the Lok Sabha election campaign, Kejriwal has called Pehowa Mann’s “sasural.”
In order to strengthen its Haryana, the AAP also plans to pressure Mann and nearly 50 other MLAs and ministers from Punjab. Mann and Sunita Kejriwal, who is assuming her husband’s role, have already spoken at rallies in Haryana.
The AAP intends to conduct door-to-door campaigns in the border seats of Shahbad, Kalayat, Guhla, Ambala, Tohana, Ratia, Narwana, Rania, Kalanwali, and Dabwali in addition to Pehowa.
Anurag Dhanda, senior vice-president of the Haryana AAP, is anticipated to run from Kalayat, the Assembly district from which the party won almost 14,500 votes in the most recent Lok Sabha elections, according to party sources.
Since the AAP is already in power in Delhi, it is also considering running for a few seats that are close to the capital, such as Rai, Sohna, Ballabgarh, and Bahadurgarh.
Even though the Lok Sabha results indicated that the AAP might benefit from a coalition with the Congress in the Assembly elections, recent remarks suggest this could not work out. Former chief minister and senior Congressman Bhupinder Singh Hooda has stated that the two parties’ partnership “was for the national level” and “not at the state level.”
In truth, the Congress is in favor of standing alone in the Assembly elections. It gained five seats in the Lok Sabha elections, which is equal to the BJP’s tally and a significant improvement from its zero-seat score in 2019.
Sushil Gupta, the president of AAP Haryana, also discusses going alone. “Recently, the AAP demonstrated its ability to compete in elections by deploying the entire national leadership in Haryana (to campaign) for 45 rallies in a mere 15 days .” For 90 Assembly seats, a total of 360 block in-charges have been appointed. By August 31, the AAP will announce its candidates.
