No hope for AAP: ABP-Nielsen says BJP will win clear majority in Delhi

If AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal is hoping that he would become the chief minister of Delhi again, he may be in for a disappointment. If the ABP News-Nielsen Opinion Poll is anything to go by, the AAP is not going to get as many seats as it did the last time.

The pre-poll survey predicts that AAP will win only 18 seats as opposed to 28 it had won in the 2013 Delhi Assembly Election.

Also, the survey brings in good news for the BJP. It predicts that the party would continue its stellar performance in Delhi, as it did in Maharashtra and Haryana, by winning 46 out of 70 seats. That would give the party a clear majority.

The Congress, the survey predicts, would perform even worse than what it did in 2013 and is expected to win only five seats. During the last elections it had won eight seats, wiping out Sheila Dikshit’s 15-year-old regime.

While the BJP has not announced any chief ministerial candidate for the upcoming Delhi polls, Kejriwal had indicated that this time too he would be the face of his party. Kejriwal, who had led AAP to a stunning debut in the assembly polls in December last year, had said there was no reason why there should be a change in chief ministerial nominee though a final decision on it would be taken by the party.

Kejriwal as the face of the AAP could actually benefit the party during the assembly polls. When asked about who would be fit for the chief minister’s post in the national capital, it was Kejriwal who got the highest votes with 39 percent respondents choosing him, followed closely by Harsh Vardhan with 38 percent votes.

ABP News reported that “About two-third respondents said that they were satisfied with the work done by Arvind Kejriwal in his 49 days tenure - this may be the reason why even now he is still considered amongst favourables for the position of CM by respondents of Delhi.”

Though some Delhiites think that Kejriwal’s stint as the chief minister was good, others felt betrayed that he quit only after 49 days. It was seen by many as a rookie act. But, as pointed out by Firstpost Editor R Jagannathan, the AAP convener may have become more careful with what he does and a new Kejriwal may be emerging: Kejriwal’s utterances this week show that he is choosing his words more carefully and also defining his politics more sensibly - indicating that the defeat in May 2014 has made him a wiser politician. His decision not to contest the two recent state assembly elections, despite internal party pressures to contest at least some seats in Haryana and Maharashtra, shows that he is committed to building the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as a long-term political party. Parties need a base to build on, and right now Delhi offers the best platform for AAP.

But Kejriwal also needs to fight what had been called the ‘Modi wave’ that swept the country during the Lok Sabha polls and evidently still continues to maintain momentum — take for example BJP’s win in Maharashtra and Haryana.

The pre-poll survey reveals that Modi is Delhi’s favourite leader with “63% respondents voting for him. Kejriwal is behind with 25 percent. Third comes Rahul Gandhi with 12 percent.”

While skeptics say that only banking on Modi’s popularity could be detrimental for the BJP, the party seems to have its game plan ready, as an article on Firstpost points out : “It wants to communicate to the Delhi voters that if they form the government, Delhi would be converted into a world-class capital city, with state-of-the-art infrastructure facilities, which at present is missing.”

If the ABP News-Nielsen Opinion Poll numbers are even close to the actual results, the Congress is out of the game, while the BJP, which has high chances of a big win, will have to fight it out with AAP in Delhi.