[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]BJP bettered its performance by winning 7 more wards in North, 12 in South and 14 in East corporations.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) retained control of all the three Municipal Corporations of Delhi for which the elections were held on April 23. The party won 182 seats in a 270-seat contest, which percentage-wise works out to 67%. This is despite the BJP councillors being in power in the three civic bodies for the last 10 years.
The Aam Aadmi Party, which was the runner-up in the MCD polls on Wednesday with 47 seats, had won the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections by winning 67 of the 70 seats on which contests were held.
The Congress was relegated to the third with 30 seats. Ajay Maken, the Delhi Congress chief, who headed the party’s campaign, resigned taking the blame for the defeat. Soon after Maken, PC Chacko, the AICC general secretary in-charge of Delhi, also put in his papers.
The BJP won 64 of the 104 wards in North Delhi, 70 of the 104 wards in South Delhi and 48 of 64 wards in East Delhi corporations.
The BJP has bettered its performance from last time by winning 7 more wards in the North, 12 in the South and 14 in the East corporations.
The party also fielded new faces in order to beat the incumbency factor in 267 wards.
“The people of Delhi have exercised their right to recall,” said BJP Delhi chief Manoj Tiwari, who demanded that Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal treat this as a vote against his government.
Lashing out at Kejriwal, Tiwari said: “We are sad that the Chief Minister is threatening and cursing its (Delhi) people, we condemn that. I am happy, the people of Delhi have rejected such people.”
Delhi Deputy CM Manish Sisodia blamed the BJP victory on the systematic tampering of Electronic Voting Machines. “This is an EVM wave not a Modi wave,” said AAP leader and Minister Gopal Rai.
BJP president Amit Shah hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule for the victory and said, “The people of Delhi have rejected negative politics, the politics of excuses.”
Speculation is rife that the biggest setback will be for Kejriwal as the results are being seen as a referendum on his governance. It will open up difficult questions like the Delhi CM’s ability to win major elections after the party’s defeat in elections to the Punjab and Goa assemblies recently.
It must be recalled that on the eve of polling for MCD elections, cow protection vigilantes, in the garb of animal rights activists, thrashed four Muslim men at Kalkaji in the heart of the capital’s southern part, for transporting buffaloes in a truck to the Ghazipur slaughterhouse. Even though the documents for the buffaloes were in order, the transporters were mercilessly thrashed and a case was filed against them by Delhi Police, invoking sections pertaining to animal cruelty, instead of the police acting against the violence unleashed by the cow vigilantes.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]