Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday said no one in the Bharatiya Janata Party was capable of becoming the chief minister. In an interview with PTI, the chief minister said that the public wanted to know who would be the chief ministerial pick of the saffron party.
Kejriwal expressed concern over the BJP’s lack of a clear choice and asked what if the party picked its national spokesperson Sambit Patra or Union Minister Anurag Thakur. Last week, the Election Commission had castigated Thakur for his comments against anti-Citizenship Act protestors, and had banned him from campaigning for Delhi polls for three days for leading the crowd at a rally in a chant, urging that “traitors be shot”.
Thakur, who has not apologised for his actions, on Tuesday accused Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia of backing the protests at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood.
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The Delhi chief minister on Thursday alleged that the BJP had tried to polarise the Assembly elections, and contended that the results will prove if they had succeeded or not. He said that those will vote for his party were expecting good education, medical treatment, modern roads, and round-the-clock electricity. Delhi will vote on Saturday and the results will be declared after three days. The last day of campaigning is Thursday.
He claimed that the BJP has not cleared the area around the Shaheen Bagh protests because of the elections. “What stopped Union Home Minister Amit Shah from clearing the stretch,” he said. “What is Amit Shah’s interest in keeping the road blocked? Why do they want to trouble the people of Delhi and do dirty politics over the protests?” The two parties have blamed each other for fuelling the CAA protests in the area.
Kejriwal said the government’s “free schemes” will go on if the party was voted back to power. Among other announcements, free travel for women in buses of the Delhi Transport Corporation and cluster buses was declared on October 29 last year. Kejriwal had said the scheme would help bridge gender inequality. In December, AAP had declared that residents of the national Capital will get 15 gigabytes of data every month through hotspot networks that will be set up across the city.
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