How BJP grafted win with focus on excise policy, ‘Sheesh Mahal’ | India News

NEW DELHI: In June 2022, then Delhi Congress president Chaudhary Anil Kumar filed a police complaint alleging financial irregularities in the excise policy formulated by the AAP govt. BJP latched onto the Congress accusation and launched an aggressive campaign, with leader of the Opposition Ramvir Singh Bidhuri raking it up in the assembly and city party president Adesh Gupta organising street protest.

It didn’t take lieutenant governor VK Saxena long to order an investigation.
“The liquor policy helped us run an anti-AAP campaign in the jhuggis, especially among women, because alcohol and drug abuse are big problems there,” said a BJP functionary. The allegations of a financial fiddle severely dented the image of a party that had made corruption the fulcrum of its existence. The taint got permanently seared in the people’s mind when deputy CM Manish Sisodia first and then CM Arvind Kejriwal were put behind bars in the case.
While embroiled in the excise policy controversy, Kejriwal waded into another by having the CM’s residence renovated at an extraordinary cost. BJP insiders claim Kejriwal’s “self-goal” diminished AAP’s image as an espouser of aam aadmi rights. As one BJP functionary explained, “‘Sheesh Mahal’ helped us to easily permeate the message that AAP did not practice what it preached and wasn’t a party of the common man.”
By this time, AAP was already feeling the heat of the legislative change giving LG the power over services, effectively giving him control of the bureaucracy. The central govt’s step resulted in increased oversight of AAP’s administrative decisions and investigations were initiated into the functioning of Delhi Jal Board and mohalla clinics, all of which served only to magnify the lapses in AAP’s governance model.
Alongside, BJP developed its own counter narrative. “We impressed on people how the central govt under PM Narendra Modi had built Delhi Metro, new expressways, purchased new buses and carried out many development projects,” said South Delhi MP Ramvir Singh Bidhuri.
The next step was using mathematics to understand what had kept BJP out of power in Delhi for 27 years. “Using the Lok Sabha poll statistics, we realised that 50% of Delhi’s electorate had no problem casting their votes for us. We needed to retain this figure for the Vidhan Sabha polls where our vote share usually fell below 40%,” said Bidhuri.
To achieve this, the party sent seniors to stay in the jhuggis and launched raucous campaigns against the poor roads and dirty water in the middle-class colonies and slums. In his rallies, PM Modi made it a point to accuse AAP of making Delhi unliveable when BJP could make a world-class city of it.
BJP also continued to cash in on AAP’s public spats with LG. “When you go to the people claiming you have done a lot of work yet accuse LG of not allowing the state govt to do any work for four and a half years, people become circumspect,” said another BJP functionary. “It was perhaps this that caused people not to believe in AAP’s promise to women of a monthly Rs 2,100 this time.” Blaming Haryana constantly for the city water woes also irked the people.
BJP recognised that slum dwellers and the economically weaker sections and lower middle class voted in large numbers for AAP. To address this drawback, the party strategically offered houses similar to those given in Ashok Vihar to slum dwellers and financial assistance to women plus other financial benefits to various groups. “Since BJP already gives women a monthly Rs 2,500 in other states, people obviously trusted in us to keep that promise. We were, thus, able to make inroads in the jhuggis,” said Bidhuri.
BJP also adopted other tactics, like man-to-man marking in deploying former MPs Parvesh Verma and Ramesh Bidhuri against, respectively, Kejriwal and CM Atishi. And to win over the migrants from other states, BJP talked of Haryana’s honour during the water poisoning episode, promised a clean Yamuna to Poorvanchalis for trouble-free Chhath Puja and assured Uttarakhandis of tapped water supply. The result? A comeback after 27 years.