Delhi’s Bijwasan assembly is in for an interesting political battle with AAP candidate Surender Bharadwaj set to take on his party’s two former colleagues, BJP’s Kailash Gehlot and Congress’ Devinder Sherawat.
Located in South West Delhi and divided by Delhi-Gurugram highway, the seat has been won by the AAP twice and once by the BJP in the last three elections. The constituency came to light in 2020 as AAP’s Bhupinder Singh Joon won it by a narrow margin of 753 votes by defeating his BJP rival Sat Prakash Rana.
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In the 2015 elections, AAP candidate Devinder Sehrawat won the seat. He polled 65,006 votes against BJP candidate Sat Prakash Rana’s 45,470 while Congress candidate Vijay Singh Lochav could manage only 5, 258 votes.
This time around, the BJP has denied a ticket to Rana and the AAP replaced incumbent MLA B S Joon. Interestingly, Sherawat is now a Congress nominee and Gehlot the nominee from the saffron party, both belonging to the Jat community that holds a position in deciding the fate of the candidates on this seat.
There are 11 villages, of which eight are Jat majority, two Yadav, and one Brahmin majority village. In addition, it has a mixed population of migrants from Purvanchal and Uttarakhand among others.
The issues here, like all other parts of Delhi, are poor roads, and inadequate connectivity of DTC buses. Moreover, the villages in the assembly constituency face lack of adequate infrastructure. The villagers had vowed to boycott the assembly elections during ‘Gaon Dehat Bachao Yatra’ under the banner of Palam 360 khap leader Surender Chouhdary.
The candidates here, especially the BJP and the AAP, are banking on the manifestos of their respective parties. For the AAP, the biggest challenge arose from the denial of ticket to its incumbent MLA, BS Joon, and fielding a Brahmin face who does not fit in the caste equation here. However, Bhardwaj is sticking to the development works accomplished by the AAP government in the city for votes.
Kailash Gehlot, the BJP’s parachute candidate, depends on Sat Prakash Rana, who pledged support to him after the last election losing narrowly, and the saffron party’s attack on the AAP for its misdeeds.
Congress’s Sherawat, on the other hand, is contesting the election by highlighting his development works as MLA from here from 2015 to 2020.
