New Delhi: The Supreme Court’s decision to release Arvind Kejriwal on bail in the excise policy case will replenish wind in the sails of the AAP ahead of the Haryana elections, party leaders said Friday, indicating that a vigorous campaign against both the ruling BJP and the principal challenger Congress was on the cards to emerge as a third pole in the state.
The Congress, however, maintained that it has no reasons, even though Kejriwal is walking out, to be perturbed over the AAP going separate ways in Haryana due to the breakdown in alliance talks between the two parties—a view echoed by political observers in the state.
Speaking to reporters after the apex court granted Kejriwal bail, AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh said, “Now, we will defeat the BJP in the battle of Haryana as well as Delhi. It will provide a boost to our campaign.”
After its talks with the Congress hit a dead end, the AAP declared candidates for all 90 assembly seats in Haryana. The Congress, meanwhile, is contesting from 89 seats, leaving one seat for the CPI(M).
“There is no question of any tacit understanding with the Congress now. The talks have failed. We will go full throttle now like we did after Kejriwal walked out on interim bail during the Lok Sabha elections,” a senior AAP leader told ThePrint.
Although Kejriwal’s campaigning did not help the AAP electorally in the Lok Sabha polls, his speeches, particularly his remarks that the BJP was planning to replace Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath after the elections, made an instant splash, putting the ruling party on the backfoot.
The AAP had so far been campaigning in Haryana putting the Delhi chief minister’s wife Sunita on the forefront. In rally after rally, she kept invoking her husband’s roots in the state’s Hisar district, as the AAP tried to push the narrative that he was “Haryana’s son”. Parallelly, it held parleys with the Congress to stitch an alliance but the talks were eventually called off with the former’s refusal to part with seats of the AAP’s liking.
Mahabir Jaglan, political analyst and a former professor at Kurukshetra University, told ThePrint that while the AAP was not in a position to win any seat, it may become a factor in the outcome in a “very few number of seats”.
“As things stand, the elections in Haryana this time are entirely bipolar between the BJP and the Congress. The AAP, if at all, may corner some Congress votes. It will not really attract BJP voters as the ones who will vote for the ruling party this time are the ideologically committed ones only. So, the AAP may get some anti-incumbency votes but it will not make any dent on the Congress’s prospects as such,” Jaglan said.
Journalist and author Pawan Kumar Bansal seconded Jaglan, saying the AAP was unlikely to cause any damage to the Congress due to the “strong anti-BJP sentiments prevailing in most parts of the Haryana”.
“And the Congress will be the prime beneficiary of that sentiment. People will vote in a way so as to not cause any split in anti-incumbency votes,” Bansal said. In the event of an alliance with the Congress, the AAP would have gained to some extent, he added.
Offered ‘non-negotiable’ terms: AAP
Speaking to ThePrint, AAP leaders attributed the breakdown in talks to the presence of three constituencies—where the Congress lost deposits in the last state polls—among the five seats that it was offered.
On top of that, as the Congress sought to drive a hard bargain by drawing Delhi into the mix, suggesting that an alliance in Haryana should lead to seat-sharing in the next assembly election in the national capital as well, the AAP threw up its hands.
In the months leading to the election to the 90-member Haryana assembly, neither the AAP, nor the Congress had shown any inclination to tie-up for the election. The leaderships of both the parties had declared their plans to go solo, months after they fielded a joint candidate (AAP’s Sushil Gupta) in the Kurukshetra seat in the Lok Sabha election.
From the AAP, Gupta, who is the party’s Haryana state unit president, was the vocal proponent of fielding candidates in all the 90 seats, rather than striking an alliance with the Congress, which was in no mood to share seats with the Arvind Kejriwal-led party either.
But Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi’s nudge for an alliance, at a meeting of the Congress’s Central Election Committee (CEC) on 2 September, set the talks in motion.
“During the talks, we felt as if the Congress leaders in Haryana agreed to have the talks just to ensure that Rahul does not get the impression that his proposal was being disregarded. No wonder they offered us seats such as Panipat Rural, Jind and Gurgaon, where the Congress candidates in the 2019 assembly election forfeited their deposits,” a senior AAP leader told ThePrint.
Its Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha represented the AAP in the talks with the Congress leadership, which had made it clear at the very beginning that it would not part with more than five seats. The AAP pushed for seats such as Pehowa and Kalayat as these are among the four assembly segments that fall under the Kurukshetra Lok Sabha constituency in which the AAP was ahead of the BJP in the general elections.
Kalayat is also the seat AAP’s Haryana vice president Anurag Dhanda wanted to contest from, “making it non-negotiable for the party”. On Wednesday, Dhanda, accompanied by former Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, filed his nomination from the seat, a day before the deadline.
With the AAP making it clear that it has no qualms in fielding disgruntled leaders from the Congress and the BJP, the Congress had been putting off the announcement of its candidates in the remaining seats.
Chhatrapal Singh, who quit the BJP after being denied a ticket, has been fielded by the AAP from the Barwala seat.
Singh had defeated former Deputy PM Devi Lal in the 1991 assembly polls.
Other such BJP rebels fielded by the AAP include Krishan Bajaj from Thanesar, Mukhtiar Singh Bazigar from Ratia, while Jawahar Lal, a former Congress leader, has been named as the AAP’s candidate in the Bawal seat.
“For us, the alliance with the Congress was an opportunity to mark our presence in the Haryana assembly but we could not have overlooked the opinion of our own workers and leaders. Like in the Congress, there was resistance from within the AAP also. And we could have never agreed if Delhi was put in the mix,” said an AAP functionary.
AAP Delhi MLA Somnath Bharti, who contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections as the INDIA bloc’s candidate from the New Delhi constituency, is among those who voiced the unease that many AAP leaders felt after the party opened talks with the Congress, saying “supporters of AAP are majorly not in favour of such a misfit and selfish alliance and AAP should contest on all seats in Haryana, Punjab and Delhi on its own”.
In a statement on X, Bharti also added that the AAP should be mindful of the fact that it was Congress leader Ajay Maken who “hatched and pursued” the excise policy case that led to the arrest of top AAP leaders including Kejriwal.
AAP ‘punching above its weight’: Congress
A Congress leader, who is among the frontrunners to get a ticket in the elections, told ThePrint that the AAP was “trying to punch above its weight” by demanding to contest from seats of its own picking. “A party that polled less than 1 percent of the total votes despite contesting from 46 seats in the 2019 Haryana state polls cannot dictate the terms of the talks.”
The AAP has featured in Haryana’s electoral fray since 2014. In Lok Sabha polls 2014, contesting from all the 10 seats, it polled 4.2 percent votes, while it gave the assembly polls held that year a miss. In 2019, it fielded three candidates in the general election in an alliance with the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP), failing to garner even 50,000 votes collectively, and also drew a blank in the assembly polls held in October that year.
The party’s impressive victory in the 2022 Punjab assembly election, decimating a Congress which was weighed down by factionalism, generated hope in the AAP, which governs Delhi too, that it was primed to do well in neighbouring Haryana also. Its Haryana chief Gupta’s performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections—he finished only around 29,000 votes behind BJP’s Naveen Jindal—also acted as a confidence booster.
“Yes, Sushil Gupta did well in Kurukshetra. But that’s because the transfer of Congress votes to him. Many in the Congress feel that we could have won the seat had the candidate been from our party,” said a senior Congress leader. The AAP, on the other hand, claims credit for the victory of Congress’s Manish Tewari from Chandigarh, attributing it to the smooth transfer of its votes to him.
As the talks dragged on, the AAP realised that by setting aside a few seats for it in Haryana, the Congress could also be setting the stage for its pound of flesh in Delhi, where assembly elections are due in 2025. That is when, the AAP tried to step up the heat on the Congress by issuing statements such as the one by its national general secretary (organisation) Sandeep Pathak that “those who will underestimate our strength will regret in the future”.
That the AAP was now serious about giving a tough fight to the Congress also became clear on Wednesday when it fielded Kavita Dalal, who has performed at the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), against Vinesh Phogat from the Julana constituency.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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