Delhi BJP working president Virendra Sachdeva (left) with Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly Ramvir Singh Bidhuri.
| Photo Credit: FILE PHOTO
Newly appointed Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Delhi working president Virendra Sachdeva on Wednesday said his first priority will be to prepare the party for the 2024 General Eection and increase its vote share from that in 2019.
“We have to make sure that all seven BJP candidates win by bigger margins this time,” he added.
After winning all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi in 2014, the BJP retained them in the 2019 General Election by securing over 56% vote share.
However, in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections this month, it managed to get only 39.09% of the total votes. The BJP won 104 wards against the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) 134 and was routed out after 15 years at the helm of the civic body. Delhi BJP president Adesh Gupta on Sunday stepped down, taking responsibility for the defeat, and Mr. Sachdeva, previously the vice-president, was elevated to working president.
Blaming his party’s defeat on the “removal of names from the voter lists”, Mr. Sachdeva claimed, “Lakhs of names were removed from the voter lists under a conspiracy of the AAP government. Had this not been done, we would have easily crossed the majority mark.”
Citing the example of Gorakh Park ward, where the BJP lost by 1,948 votes, he said this was “because of the removal of 9,600 votes”.
The Delhi BJP chief also alleged there were many wards where votes of “a large number of BJP supporters were deleted”, adding that the party will do a ward-wise analysis in the coming days to dissect its defeat.
Mr. Sachdeva also said that his party had received a “good mandate” in the MCD polls and AAP will have to seek its cooperation to run the civic body. “People have given us the responsibility to keep a check on the corrupt AAP so that scams like excise policy and money laundering are not repeated,” he said, adding that the BJP will support AAP if it works to fulfil its poll promises.
The Delhi BJP chief said he was just a party worker under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and that the party will inform people of various benefits the city has been provided by the Central government.
To analyse its performance in the MCD polls, the BJP mapped the results on the city’s seven Lok Sabha seats and found that it trailed AAP in five. As per the analysis, seen by Today News 24, it suffered the most in South Delhi, the constituency of Ramesh Bidhuri, followed by West Delhi, represented by Parvesh Sahib Singh, with trailing margins of more than 80,000 and 60,000 votes, respectively.
