New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Sunday, December 15, released its final list of 38 candidates for the Delhi Assembly polls due in February. Party supremo Arvind Kejriwal will contest from the New Delhi constituency, and Chief Minister Atishi will contest again from Kalkaji.
In its bid for a third consecutive term in power in the national capital, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has nominated its senior leaders from their own constituencies.
Ministers Saurabh Bharadwaj, Gopal Rai, Imran Hussain, Raghuvinder Shokeen and Mukesh Kumar Ahlawat will contest the polls from Greater Kailash, Babarpur, Ballimaran, Nangloi Jat and Sultanpur Majra respectively.
In the 2020 election, the AAP had secured 62 of the 70 seats in Delhi, solidifying its dominance in the capital’s politics.
The upcoming polls are expected to be a litmus test for the party’s governance model and its appeal to the electorate.
Earlier on December 9, the AAP had fielded senior party leader Manish Sisodia from the Jangpura seat.
Educator Avadh Ojha, who recently joined the AAP, has been fielded from the Patparganj seat Sisodia holds in the current assembly.
The earlier list also includes the names of Jintender Singh Shunty (fielded from Shahdara) and Surinder Pal Singh Bittu (Timarpur), who recently quit the BJP to join the AAP.
Shunty replaces sitting AAP MLA and Speaker in the outgoing Assembly Ram Niwas Goel, while Bittu has been fielded in place of Dilip Pandey, AAP’s chief whip in the house.
‘EC colluding with BJP; Deleting voter IDs’
Senior AAP leader Sanjay Singh had accused the Election Commission of “colluding with the BJP” as he reiterated his party’s claims of deletion of voters’ names from electoral rolls ahead of the Delhi Assembly elections.
Addressing a press conference here, the Rajya Sabha MP said an application for the deletion of 3,800 voters’ names has been submitted in the RK Puram constituency and they belong to booths where the AAP has been winning elections.
AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal and other party leaders have been alleging that many voters’ names have been deleted from electoral rolls ahead of the Delhi polls due to be held in February next year.
“We came to know that an application for the deletion of 3,800 voters’ names has been submitted in the RK Puram constituency. When our workers and local MLA verified these voters, they found that 1,800 of them are still living in the same place and are eligible voters,” Singh claimed at the press conference.
“The voters named in the application belong to those booths where the AAP has been winning elections in the past,” he said.
Last week, Kejriwal claimed that a BJP leader filed an application with Delhi’s poll panel for the deletion of more than 11,000 voters’ names in the Shahdara constituency.
Singh further accused the Election Commission of India of “colluding with the BJP”.
He urged the chief election commissioner to go and meet the voters who have been named in the application to ascertain whether they were eligible voters or not.
Follow on Twitter | Posted by Parameswaran Valeri | 
