Therein lies a lesson for BJP led by the wily Amit Shah. The highpitch negative campaign that the party launched against Kejriwal in the run-up to the elections seems to have backfired on BJP. The huge ads in newspapers, mocking Kejriwal, completely overshadowed the party's attempts to highlight its own development agenda. This was only the last mistake that BJP appears to have committed in the last few months leading to the elections on Saturday.
"There was a sense of desperation when it hit the party that AAP had gained ground and could not be trifled with," the BJP leader told ET. It was then that the BJP lined up all the senior leaders and over 100 MPs to hit the campaign trail in Delhi.
Votes were sought in the name of prime minister Narendra Modi, who himself came out in full force to address four rallies in five days. On Saturday, when the results of exit polls started coming out, all the party spokespersons were busy saying that "whatever the actual outcome on February 10, it would not be a referendum on Modi". The party had already started extricating Modi from the responsibility of a possible defeat in the Capital.
Several BJP leaders that ET spoke to said that it was simply unbelievable how the party had come from a position of unassailable strength to the possibility of a defeat at the hands of a party it termed as that of "anarchists" and incapable of administration.
One of the biggest mistakes made by the party was dithering on holding elections in Delhi. "Why should a party that swept Lok Sabha elections and the subsequent Assembly elections in Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Haryana and put up an impressive show in Jammu and Kashmir, shirk from polls in the Capital," questioned a leader, who was a strong proponent of holding early polls.
Explaining the party's point of view in delaying elections, he said that it wanted to strengthen its unit in Delhi. "They got hundreds of RSS workers to work in Delhi. But it only made matters worse. The local BJP workers thought that there was nothing for them to do. Instead of strengthening the party, it deepened the faultlines," he said. By the time the party realized that AAP, having got enough time to recover and recoup, was looking stronger, they decided to bring in Kiran Bedi as the CM candidate.
"The choice may not have been too bad considering her standing as an honest upright IPS officer among the middle classes. She would have been a good person to take on Kejriwal. But she was brought on board too late. After whatever the party did appeared to be reactive. AAP was setting the agenda," said another BJP leader. The BJP's attempts to swamp the Capital with nearly 90,000 workers on ground in the last few days to visit households and establish direct contact with the voters may be the case of too little, too late.
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