Ahead of the 5 Feb polls, Kejriwal announced host of freebies, including hike in promised aid to women, free healthcare for senior citizens, life insurance for auto drivers etc.
New Delhi: For 60-year-old Kamal, a tailor who works and lives in Delhi’s Jangpura, former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal “doesn’t lie”.
He is not the only one. For many of the Capital’s residents, while the sheen of Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) may have worn away, his political stature hasn’t taken much of a hit.
Kamal, who has witnessed the rise and fall of several governments as a longtime Delhi resident, has voted for Kejriwal since he entered politics. The Bhogal resident cited the AAP’s freebies as well as its work on schools and hospitals as his reasons.
Kejriwal stormed onto the national stage in 2010 as part of the Jan Lokpal anti-corruption movement led by activist Anna Hazare. In 2012, he launched AAP which he said was the “result of our struggle against corruption”.
Then, in the 2013 elections, the AAP and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged neck-and-neck, ending Congress’s dominance over the Capital’s politics. Kejriwal became chief minister with the support of the Congress.
He was only CM for 49 days and during that time, between December 2013 and February 2014, Kejriwal announced 20,000 litres of free water per month for every household and a power tariff reduction of 50 percent for Delhi residents using up to 400 units a month.
When the Aam Aadmi Party won 67 out of 70 seats in the early elections held in 2015, the New York Times called it a “smaller political earthquake” that had struck the nation’s Capital after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory in Lok Sabha elections a year earlier.
Months ahead of the 2020 assembly polls, Kejriwal unveiled more freebies for Delhi residents—free bus rides for women and free electricity up to 200 units—consolidating AAP’s stronghold over Delhi. The party secured 62 seats in elections that year.
However, the third term—its second full-term—was largely uneventful with no big policy announcements. Ahead of the 5 February assembly elections this year, he promised to raise the monthly allowance under the AAP government’s Mahila Samman Rashi scheme from Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,100 for eligible women if the party returns to power.
In the last two weeks, ThePrint visited 21 slums, JJ resettlement colonies and lower-middle-class households across the length and breadth of Delhi. With 10 years in power, anti-incumbency seemed to have set in against the AAP government. But the corruption allegations against Kejriwal didn’t appear to have resonated on the ground, with people viewing it largely as a BJP political ploy.
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