On the eve of the Delhi voting, many regional parties, ranging from the JD(U) to the Trinamool Congress and the Left to the Janata Dal (S), extended their support to the AAP once opinion polls gave Kejriwal's party the thumbs up. It is generally explained away as their combined desire to see at least some party finally stopping the BJP's serial victories — Lok Sabha polls, then victories in Haryana, Maharsahtra, Jharkhand and a good show in Jammu and Kashmir.
But the joke in Delhi's political circles is that all these new-found friends and wellwishers of Kejriwal's party — be it Nitish, Mamata, Karat or Gowda — could also be privately hoping a Delhi victory will not embolden Kejriwal to expand the AAP's electoral ambitions on their turfs in upcoming Assembly polls in Bihar, West Bengal or Kerala!
If the AAP can smash the Cong ress' entrenched base in Delhi in a matter of two years, what would happen if it decides to expand its role as a new "Leftof-the-centre" alternative to BJP by trying to occupy the receding Left turf in West Bengal as a new challenge to Mamata; or to emerge as an alternative in Bihar, in place of the much discredited JD(U) and RJD, to put up a credible resistance against BJP? The Congress too is aware that a victory in Delhi would boost AAP's national ambition and chances.
APP could look at Punjab where it won two Lok Sabha seats as its another area for growth by breaking the bipolar politics of Congress and Akali-BJP combine. A victory in Delhi could boost the confidence of underprivileged social sections as well as minorities to look at AAP as the new force that can confront the BJP and Modi. Even a sizeable sections of urban middle class, the traditional supporters of the BJP may once again start looking at the AAP as a new platform to park themselves.
But, then, many also point out that electoral battles are not as simplistic as an armchair theory but a guerilla warfare where the tricks and plots differ from terrain to terrain just as social issues and combinations vary from state to state. But what is not in doubt is an AAP victory in Delhi would keep both Kejriwal's foes as well his fairweather friends wary of his next moves beyond the national capital.
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