By Saiyed Dansih, TwoCircles.net,
New Delhi: In what could be termed as a historic verdict in Delhi Assembly polls the ruling Congress has been badly uprooted by the BJP and AAP as the Sheila phenomenon to which Delhiites would wake up every morning for fifteen years witnessed a crushing defeat sinking the ship of the party down to the ocean bed.
The fact that the party which had secured 42 seats comfortably in 2008, could not even save its face and succumbed at a shockwave figure of 8, including Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit herself and ministers like AK Walia.
Deserted AICC Headquarter.
For days to come today’s results are going to send the party in an intense mode of introspection while the political pundits will grope for reasons why the mighty fort of the Congress party fell to an onslaught led by “an outsider from Ghaziabad” as Arvind Kejriwal, who defeated Sheila Dikshit by a margin of 26,000 votes, was once infamously sneered at. But one determining factor which the party would want to mull over the most is the shift of the poor, slum dwellers and migrants to BJP and AAP.
Delhi’s 1.4 crore slum and Jhuggi Jhopdi colony voters who are scattered around the 70 constituencies expressed their discontent with the ruling party if the poll results are to be believed.
R.K. Puram which houses 70-75% slum dwellers gave its verdict in favour of BJP’s Anil Kumar Sharma who secured 28017 votes while the sitting Congress MLA Barkha Shukla Singh polled 19679 votes only to come third. Shazia Ilmi of AAP gave tough fight to BJP, but lost in a close battle.
In Narela constituency, BJP’s Neel Daman Khatri defeated Congress candidate and last term sitting MLA Jaswant Singh with a gargantuan margin of 28,000 votes. Similarly, in Bawana, voters did not re-elect Surender Kumar of Congress who secured only 42054 votes this time and lost to BJP’s Gugan Singh by a margin of 26000 votes.
Nangloi Jat voters also rejected the sitting Congress MLA Dr. Bijender Singh who is defeated by Manoj Kumar Shokeen by 11,000 votes. Kanwar Karan Singh of Congress from Model Town which is a big hub of slum clusters also faced defeat as he could secure only 23983 votes to hold third position in the constituency.
The unsparing defeat of Congress party in these slum-dominated constituencies along with others like Seemapuri, Kalkaji, Shahadara Chhatarpur comes as a surprise as before the elections the Delhi government had taken massive steps in regularizing colonies and rolling implementing policies of rehabilitating lakhs of slum dwellers in low-cost flats.
As per central government’s rehabilitation scheme Sheila Dikshit had given green light to the construction of 68,000 dwellings units for economically weaker sections out of which 50,000 of them were almost completed. Constituencies like Narela and Bawana where Congress lost with huge margins were given importance in the project and many families had been rehabilitated there.
Similarly, the government had vehemently regularized hundreds of unauthorized colonies since last year. Sheila Dikshit had announced regularization of 917 colonies under Union Urban Development Ministry in which order of regularization 895 colonies had been cleared by the then Lt Governor Tejinder Khanna which was set to benefit 35 lakh residents.
However, the opposition had been terming the regularization drive of the government as a poll gimmick and had been pointing out at many occasions that regularization is only on paper as more than 50 lakh people still lived in unauthorized colonies all over Delhi. Perhaps the anti-incumbency anger for the central government got reflected in the Delhi election but nevertheless Rahul’s idea of “bouncing back in ways you have never imagined” fails as an ointment on party’s wound.
As the Congress party lost its traditional bastion of slum dwellers and unauthorized colonies in Delhi, it is a time to rethink strategies and reclaim the support of voters who have shown that votes do not come free of cost. Surely, this defeat of Congress party from the perspective of losing votes of the poor confined them to a single digit figure party, the figure which it must have imagined for an amateur AAP and which betrays the fact the Congress’s ‘hand’ is certainly not with the common man.
The only savior for Congress in Delhi appears to be Muslim dominated constituencies, four out of eight seats they have won include Muslim MLAS. These are Asif Mohamamd Khan (Okhla), Haroon Yusuf (Ballimaran), Chaudhary Mateen Ahmed (Seelampur) and Hassan Ahmed (Mustafabad).
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Woes of Delhi slums and the upcoming Assembly elections