A victory for the AAP will come as a shot in the arm for Arvind Kejriwal’s national ambitions as he plans to emerge as the third front.
Will the BJP continue to govern the govern the powerful Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) for a fourth consecutive term or will the Aam Aadmi Party turn the tables this time? What people of Delhi have decided will be revealed on Wednesday when the counting of votes is being taken up for the MCD polls.
The counting of votes, which will begin at 8 am amid tight security, will be taken up at 42 centres. There are 250 wards in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and 1,349 candidates are in the fray in this election.
The centres are located in areas, including, Shastri Park, Yamuna Vihar, Mayur Vihar, Nand Nagari, Dwarka, Okhla, Mangolpuri, Pitampura, Alipur and Model Town.
Tight security arrangements have been made at all the centres with with 20 companies of Central Armed Police Forces and more than 10,000 police personnel deployed for the day at the centres, police officials said.
The high-stakes civic polls were largely touted as a three-way contest between a spirited AAP, a confident BJP and a hopeful Congress. However, it later seemed to be turning into a bipolar contest between the AAP and the BJP.
While both AAP and BJP have exuded confidence that they will emerge victorious, exit polls have predicted a landslide victory for the Arvind Kejriwal’s ruling party.
If the exit poll hold true, it will come as a big setback for the BJP which has been ruling the MCD since 2007. Meanwhile, a victory for the AAP will come as a shot in the arm for Arvind Kejriwal’s national ambitions as he plans to emerge as the third front.
For AAP, a clear victory in the MCD elections will be yet another example of its sway over Delhi and will also serve as a consolation since the exit polls have also predicted that the party's hopes of victory in the Gujarat assembly polls are likely to fail this time.
A defeat, which seems unlikely in the light of exit poll predictions, will, however, jolt the AAP that registered massive victories in Delhi assembly polls in 2015 and 2020. The third main contender in the fray, the Congress, too hoped to prove the exit polls wrong on Wednesday.
The Congress that ruled Delhi under the chief ministership of Sheila Dikshit for 15 years has seen its political space being occupied by the AAP after 2013. The party failed to win even a single seat in Delhi in two Lok Sabha and Assembly elections each, between 2014 to 2020.
The BJP trounced both the AAP and the Congress by winning 181 of 272 wards of the three municipal corporations in the 2017 elections. The AAP in its civic polls debut won 48 and the Congress 30 wards. Earlier this year, the Centre merged the three municipal corporations into MCD having a total 250 wards.
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