The Aam Aadmi Party has set its sights on Haryana and Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat-like campaigns are on the cards. While MP goes to polls in 2023, Assembly elections in Haryana will take place only in October 2024.
Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram, Nagaland, Telangana, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan are expected to go to polls in 2023. However, the 10-year-old AAP is gearing to focus on Haryana and MP, insiders said. AAP will, nonetheless, field candidates in all the 10 poll-bound states in 2023.
“Karnataka polls are scheduled earlier in the year and at present, we do not have the kind of organisation there that we would like. Contesting elections in states where there are shortcomings at an organisational level is only going to harm us, so we may not contest at all, or may not put a lot of energy in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh either,” explained an AAP leader.
He added: “Haryana is sandwiched between two AAP-ruled states and people are constantly exposed to the work done by AAP here, as well as what is being done in Punjab. A lot of people who work in Delhi are also from Haryana. All these things automatically give us an edge in the state. We will go into the Haryana Assembly polls full-steam.”
The party fared well in the Madhya Pradesh civic polls and has an elected mayor in the BJP-ruled state. Even though Rajasthan’s proximity to Delhi favours the shift of maximum attention to the state, the leader shared that the AAP organization is stronger in Madhya Pradesh.
Hence, “MP and Haryana will be our focus in 2023 and 2024 respectively” he said.
Interestingly, at present, AAP has no MP in the Lower House. To this, the senior leader answered: “We have seen that focussing on states and building from thereon has given us benefits. It also has a more lasting impact. We now have a very methodical person — Sandeep Pathak — at the helm of organisation-building affairs in the party. Earlier, all of this was being coordinated with Kejriwal ji with leaders in charge of states. With Sandeep Pathak being in charge of states and the organisation, we can expect him to work with Kejriwal to create more robust systems on the ground,” the leader said.
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