Opposition will lose all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi: BJP

Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva and leader of opposition Ramvir Singh Bidhuri.

Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Meenakshi Lekhi and party president Virendra Sachdeva on Saturday slammed the pact announced by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Congress for the Lok Sabha seats in the Capital and four other states, calling it an “alliance of the corrupt”.

Lekhi said the two parties tied up so that they could pin the blame on each other after they lose all seven Lok Sabha seats in the national capital and recalled the AAP’s past attacks on the Congress.

“Two parties that have earlier tried to prove which of them was the bigger thief, corrupt and looted Delhi more, have formed an alliance today — chor-chor mausere bhai (an idiom that translates to birds of a feather flock together),” said Sachdeva, and promised to take the alliance “head-on” in the Capital.

The Congress has finalised its seat-sharing arrangements with the AAP, agreeing to jointly contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections in Delhi, Haryana, Goa, Gujarat and Chandigarh. In Delhi, the Congress will contest the Chandni Chowk, North West Delhi and North East Delhi seats, while the AAP will field its candidates from New Delhi, East Delhi, West Delhi and South Delhi. However, the INDIA Alliance partners will not be joining forces in Punjab.

“I want to remind you of 2013, when the AAP said the Congress is a corrupt party, and that there cannot be a more corrupt party than that. In an interview, Kejriwal even said that let alone one or two ministers, all those within the Congress are corrupt,” said Lekhi, who is a Union minister of state for external affairs.

She also read out a list of “corrupt leaders” put out by the chief minister and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal in 2014, which included then Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, Union ministers Kapil Sibal, Sushilkumar Shinde, Veerappa Moily, GK Vasan, Salman Khurshid, Kamal Nath, Sriprakash Jaiswal, Farooq Abdullah and Sharad Pawar.

She added that during a session of the Delhi state assembly, Kejriwal had demanded that Rajiv Gandhi’s Bharat Ratna be rescinded and he had sworn that he would never ally with the Congress in 2019. “Kejriwal used to walk around with a sheaf of papers, saying that they had sufficient proof against Sheila Dixit,” she said.

However, Lekhi also claimed that the AAP had, in fact, been propped up by the Congress from its establishment, and was created in order to divide India’s anti-corruption movement. That the AAP had been allowed to use the symbol of the broom right from its electoral debut was evidence of support from the Congress and “links” between Kejriwal and Congress leader Sonia Gandhi.

Lekhi added the alliance had failed to understand both the “arithmetic” and “chemistry” of politics, as even if both their vote shares in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections of Delhi were combined, it would still fail to defeat BJP.

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The minister expressed the BJP’s “anger” over the West Bengal government, led by the Trinamool Congress, another prospective constituent of the INDIA Alliance of the opposition parties. She said the Bengal administration had failed to address the “rampant harassment and trafficking of women, exploitation of women and children” in Sandeshkhali, and alleged that the state government extended support to the perpetrators of this violence, rather than its victims.

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