A positive record

Published : Nov 21, 2003 00:00 IST

It is advantage Congress(I) in Delhi as the party, led by Chief Minister Sheila Dixit, prepares to take on the BJP.

in New Delhi

THE issue of onion prices and intense infighting within the then ruling Bharatiya Janata Party brought the Congress(I) to power in the Delhi Assembly elections in 1998. Five years since, the Congress(I) also appears to suffer from similar woes. The panic spread by an outbreak of dengue and the party's reluctance to project Chief Minister Sheila Dixit as its chief ministerial candidate should in the normal course be rated as factors that could affect the party's prospects in the ensuing elections. However, the Congress(I) seems to have used these issues to its advantage, by effectively containing the dengue menace and by focussing more on its performance in office than on the leadership issue.

The Congress(I)'s strategy seems to have gone well with the electorate, or so suggests at least three public opinion surveys that have given the party a definite lead over the BJP. On October 30, a survey by the Centre for Forecasting and Research (CFORE) predicted that the Congress(I) would win exactly half the votes cast, 15 percentage points more than the BJP. The results nearly tallied with the results of earlier polls. While an ORG-Marg poll done for an English magazine gave the Congress(I) 49 per cent of the votes polled, a CSDS poll done for a leading English daily awarded the Congress(I) 48 per cent. All the surveys agreed on Chief Minister Sheila Dixit's personal popularity, which is way ahead of her rival, former Chief Minister and BJP leader Madan Lal Khurana. This is likely to help the Congress(I) achieve a comfortable majority in the 70-member Assembly.

The Congress(I) is likely to hold on to its traditional bases of support among Muslims, Dalits and the poor. Besides, the party appears set to make inroads into the BJP's support bases among the Jat and Sikh communities.

The BJP, which has projected Khurana as its chief ministerial candidate, is trying to put its past behind it, and cash in on the Congress(I)'s alleged lapses in office. True, the BJP does not suffer from the intense factionalism that plagued it in 1998. Two of Khurana's prominent rivals then, Sahib Singh Verma and Sushma Swaraj, are now in the Union Cabinet and the BJP thinks it will help the party project itself as a cohesive force under Khurana's leadership. But the BJP is finding it difficult to erase from public memory the frequent changes of leadership it resorted to, ostensibly to improve its electoral prospects, towards the end of its tenure in office. Khurana quit to pave the way for Sahib Singh Verma's assumption of chief ministership following the former's alleged involvement in the Jain hawala scandal and Verma himself had to go in favour of Sushma Swaraj on the eve of the Assembly elections. The leadership changes hardly helped to stem the party's decline in the public esteem.

In contrast, the Congress(I) is projecting political stability in the form of Sheila Dixit's uninterrupted five-year tenure as a positive sign of its commitment to Delhi's development. To add to the BJP's woes, the party is unable to find any potent issue to disturb the `feel-good' factor that favours the Sheila Dixit regime. The party's campaign against corruption in various departments, including the alleged power scam, has not made any impact on the voters. The two major campaign issues in Delhi are the demand for statehood and the transfer of the subject of law and order in Delhi from the Central government to the Delhi government.

At one time, the BJP had used the statehood demand as a major poll issue. Now, with the party having been in power at the Centre for the past five years and it having failed to bring legislation in Parliament to fulfil this demand the BJP has realised that it will be blamed for its failure. To shift the blame, it has accused the Congress(I) of not bringing a resolution in the Delhi Assembly demanding statehood, so that the Central government could proceed on its basis.

Again, on the subject of law and order in the capital, which has seen a sharp rise in crime against women in recent months, the Sheila Dixit government has put the Central government in the dock for ineffective policing. Ironically, the BJP too supports the demand for the transfer of law and order and police administration to ensure greater accountability in controlling crime. However, it has no suggestions to achieve the goal.

THE BJP hoped to use as another campaign theme the dengue menace, which resulted in a number of deaths in the capital, and the Delhi government's inability to tackle it. But with the onset of winter, the number of dengue patients reporting in the hospitals has declined, and this has made the Sheila Dixit government's claims about the effectiveness of its anti-dengue measures credible.

The Delhi electorate has always distinguished between issues that are relevant in the Assembly polls and in the Lok Sabha elections. After voting the Congress(I) to power in 1998 in the Assembly elections, it elected BJP candidates from all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi in the October 1999 general elections.

Bereft of issues that can capture the voters' imagination, the BJP is toying with the idea of converting the ensuing Assembly elections into an Atal Bihari Vajpayee vs Sonia Gandhi contest at the national level. The belief is that as the next Lok Sabha polls are likely to be held any time next year, the outcome of these Assembly elections will set the stage for the big electoral battle and its agenda.

Hence it is felt that for the BJP it would make sense to focus on the good governance of the Central government to woo the Delhi electorate in the Assembly elections. However, going by past trends, the Delhi voter is unlikely to be swayed by the BJP's claims.

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