Campaigning for Delhi municipal polls ends
The campaign for the high-profile Municipal Corporation of Delhi elections came to an end on Friday, with top campaigners, including chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and Union ministers Hardeep Singh Puri, Piyush Goyal, and Anurag Thakur, reaching out to voters in full swing through public meetings and roadshows.
The voting for the civic polls will be held on Sunday and counting will take place on December 7.
The BJP, which has been ruling the civic body for 15 consecutive years, held more than 200 programmes on Friday and the party’s senior ministers along with Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami and UP deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya held roadshows to woo the voters.
This will be the first MCD election after the delimitation of the wards. Both the BJP and the AAP have fielded candidates in all the 250 municipal wards, while the Congress is contesting only 247 wards.
The MCD election is likely to witness a straight fight between the AAP and the BJP, with the Congress appearing to have been relegated to a distant third.
In 2012, the contest was bi-polar between the Congress and the BJP, when the latter took a massive lead. The nature of the contest changed from bi-polar to a threecornered contest between the BJP, AAP, and the Congress in 2017 with BJP again leading the race.
Hours before the culmination of the campaigning, Mr Kejriwal made an appeal to the voters to give one chance to the AAP to clean the “corruptioninfested MCD.”
Addressing a Town Hall style meeting of traders in the national capital, Mr Kejriwal, as he asked for change, said that it has never happened that the Delhi government and the MCD are under the control of the same party.
Mr Kejriwal said, “There is a need for change. Change is necessary. One of the biggest reasons for change is ego. If there is no change, it results in ego, exactly similar to what has happened with BJP in Gujarat. They have been ruling the MCD for 15 years and a change is needed.”
The AAP leader said, “It has never happened in all these years that there is the same party in the Delhi government and the MCD. Let’s try to form a single-party government this time. I will also be comfortable. I will call both, the MLA and the councillor, and ask why the work was not done.”
The CM alleged that the MCD was mired in corruption and the BJP has no intention to clean it up.