AAP number of candidate debate still on

Sensing “poor performance” in the elections, the party is now debating whether it should have fielded more than 450 candidates. A section within the AAP feels if the party had stuck to its leader Arvind Kejriwal’s plan to field candidates against 162 politicians facing corruption and criminal charges, it could have brought dividends to the party in the parliamentary elections.

Many within the party feel that by fielding a large number of candidates, the party seem to have lost its focus on the issues which were central to its philosophy. Others think that lack of infrastructure and paucity of funds were other factors which could hurt the party’s prospects in these polls. But there are many who think that by fielding candidates in almost every nook and corner of the country could help the party to perform better in the future elections.

They argue that if the party was able to get a respectable vote share all across the country, it would automatically be registered as a national party. Mr Kejriwal had time and again made his stand clear that he would like to take on those leaders who were facing corruption and criminal charges. But many senior leaders had opposed the idea, saying that this was a golden chance for the party to spread its wings across the length and breadth of the country.

What’s reportedly worrying the party the most is that if its vote share, in comparison to the December Assembly elections, goes down in the seven LS seats in Delhi, then the party is in for a major trouble.

Spin doctors claim that a section of the middle and upper middle class voters who had voted for the AAP in the Assembly poll, had supported the saffron brigade.

By this logic, the AAP’s vote share is likely to go down and this could be the beginning of the end for the country’s only political spring after the independence movement. But a senior AAP functionary claimed that the party’s vote share was bound to go up as a majority of the Muslims had voted for its candidates all across the country.

The AAP leader said, “We got 25 per cent votes in the Delhi Assembly elections. But then the Muslims had not voted for us. Now a majority of the community has voted for us. Our vote share is bound to increase.”

An active AAP functionary explained that the rationale behind fielding a large number of candidates was to involve as many people as one could in different parts of the country. “This helped us to spread our message all across the country. Now, our candidates have got better exposure. In future, they will strengthen our organisational machinery at the grass root level in different states.”