In revival mode, Delhi Congress out to sever ties with AAP

As the AAP hurtles from one challenge to the other, the Congress party’s Delhi unit, The Federal has learnt, is trying to prevail upon the party high command to “not impose” on it another pre-poll alliance. The Delhi Congress leaders, sources said, are of the view that the AAP’s popularity is “on a steady tailspin” and that the Congress would “lose even the slightest chance of an electoral revival in Delhi” if it returns to a poll-pact with the jailed Kejriwal’s party.

Congress-AAP alliance in 2024 LS polls

In the recently concluded Lok Sabha polls, the members of Opposition’s INDIA bloc, the AAP and Congress fielded candidates in Delhi’s four and three seats, respectively, but drew a blank. The BJP wrested all seven seats for a third consecutive time, albeit with vastly reduced victory margins compared to the 2014 and 2019 general elections.

The Congress had also spared two seats in Gujarat and one in Haryana for the AAP. The AAP failed to win any of its allotted seats in the two states even while the Congress remarkably improved its performance in Haryana: wresting five of the state’s 10 Lok Sabha seats. In Punjab, where the AAP is in power and has the Congress as its principal Opposition party, the two had decided against any alliance.

Since the June 4 election results, the two INDIA bloc parties have maintained a steady alliance nationally, both inside Parliament and at public events.

Delhi Congress stays aloof

Earlier this week, the Congress high command dispatched Pramod Tiwari and Gaurav Gogoi, the party’s deputy leaders in the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha, respectively, to address a protest organised by the AAP against Kejriwal’s continued incarceration in the Delhi excise policy case despite his steeply falling blood sugar levels.

At the protest, which incidentally came amid a political furore against the AAP government’s alleged administrative and civic negligence following the deaths of three UPSC aspirants who drowned at a flooded coaching centre in Delhi’s Old Rajinder Nagar, both Tiwari and Gogoi repeatedly assured Kejriwal’s wife, Sunita Kejriwal, and other AAP leaders that the Congress “stands firmly” with them.

However, no leader from the Congress’s Delhi unit, including the AAP-backed Congress candidates in the Lok Sabha polls in Delhi – JP Aggarwal, Kanhaiya Kumar and Udit Raj – attended the protest.

Instead, the Congress’s Delhi unit has found common ground with archrival BJP in slamming Kejriwal and his party for the civic mess that Delhi has found itself in, yet again, this monsoon. The Congress’s central leaders, like leaders from other INDIA bloc parties, have blamed the Centre for crippling the Delhi government and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi – both controlled by the AAP – through Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena and an uncooperative bureaucracy.

In contrast, the Delhi Congress leaders have maintained that the coaching centre tragedy as well as the recently exposed deaths of 14 inmates of the Delhi government-run Asha Kiran home due to various health issues, was the result of “administrative anarchy” under AAP-rule.

Last chance

With Kejriwal continuing to run his government from jail while his cabinet colleagues fend off charges of sinking Delhi into “administrative collapse”, “crumbling civic infrastructure” and the city-state’s resultant ill-preparedness for monsoons, the Congress’s Delhi unit feels there is a need to “completely dissociate” with the AAP and “focus on rebuilding the party at the grassroots”, given that Delhi is scheduled for assembly polls by February next year.

The Congress’s Delhi unit’s concerns seem at variance with the party’s high command which does not want any fissures in the INDIA bloc to be exposed at a time when they believe the Lok Sabha poll results and subsequent political events have got Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP cornered.

With their party having failed to win a single seat in the 70-member Delhi assembly since 2015 and ceding almost the entirety of its electoral base to the AAP, Delhi Congress leaders see the upcoming assembly polls as “the last chance” for turning things around. An alliance with the AAP at a time when the party is drowning in controversies and has lost much of its sheen of the past decade, sources in the Delhi Congress claim, would “sink us completely”.

Trust deficit

Sources said the Delhi Congress leaders had begun to pressurise the party high command to sever ties with the AAP soon after the Lok Sabha results. A senior Congress leader told The Federal that during discussions with an intra-party panel led by senior leader PL Punia, which was constituted by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to assess the party’s poor Lok Sabha poll performance in Delhi, “nearly all members” of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC) had blamed the defeat on “lack of cooperation” and even sabotage by the AAP.

The panel was also informed that the Congress lost a string of leaders, including its former Delhi unit chief Arvinder Singh Lovely, to the BJP mid-way through the elections due to the alliance with Kejriwal’s party.

Following the election results, sources said, there had been “no communication” between the Delhi Congress and the AAP even though the Congress’s central leadership and senior AAP leaders consulted regularly about the INDIA bloc’s future strategy against the BJP.

Now, with heavy rains wreaking havoc in the national capital and even proving fatal for several Delhi residents, the DPCC believes it has an added excuse to go it alone in next year’s assembly polls and revert to its acerbic attacks at the Kejriwal’s government.

MLA's funds

On August 2, former Delhi councillor and AICC secretary Abhishek Dutt wrote to the Delhi LG seeking “urgent action” to stem the “deteriorating situation in Delhi, particularly during the rains and otherwise”.

“It is concerning that each MLA out of the 70 receives a discretionary fund which is about ₹10 crore every year for their respective constituencies... the discretionary funds allocated to MLAs are intended for the improvement of sewage, drains and water pipelines, which have not been properly utilised, leading to major civic issues,” Dutt wrote.

The Delhi Congress leader further asserted that “every tender issued for desilting and MLA-LAD fund should be thoroughly verified and those found guilty of misappropriating government funds be held accountable with strict action. I urge you to form a committee to verify the MLA-LAD funds spent in each constituency... investigate any discrepancies, especially duration of tender against actual time taken to finish the work, quality of work and whether money was deducted for delay...”

Though Dutt didn’t name any party or individual, the contents of his letter made it clear that his target wasn’t the LG, who controls the levers of Delhi’s bureaucracy, but the ruling AAP, which presently has 61 MLAs in the 70-member assembly.

Existential crisis

Devender Yadav, interim chief of Delhi Congress, too has been making veiled attacks at the AAP over the past week, ruing the “collapsing infrastructure” of the national capital. “It seems like there is no government, no municipal corporation and no administration left in Delhi, The city is crumbling; the tragic deaths of three young students at a coaching centre and 14 mentally challenged people, including a minor, at Asha Kiran all prove that Delhi is suffering from administrative anarchy,” Yadav told The Federal.

Yadav’s senior and former Congress MP Sandeep Dikshit left little to imagination when he claimed at a press conference on Saturday (August 3) that the party in control of the Delhi government was “more worried about the carbohydrates in the diet of one person... than the challenges that the city is grappling with; this is the tragedy of Delhi”.

Dikshit’s reference, of course, was to the AAP’s claims that Kejriwal was not being fed a proper diet in Tihar Jail causing his blood sugar levels to fall dangerously low.

Delhi Congress leaders admit the party “faces an existential crisis” in the capital after 10 years of crippling routs in assembly and civic body polls and large-scale desertion by senior party leaders who have, over this period, switched either to BJP or AAP.

“We have no organisation left in Delhi even though we were in power here for 15 consecutive years till just a decade ago,”a Congress veteran and former multiple term MLA told The Federal, adding that “we may draw a blank again in the assembly polls, with or without an alliance with the AAP but the real question that we need to address urgently is whether an alliance with AAP will do us any good, particularly at this time when its main face (Kejriwal) has lost much of his credibility and is in jail while his government’s failures keep stacking up”.

Muslim voters and AAP

Another former Congress MLA said the high command “needs to realise that the AAP would never want the Congress reviving in Delhi because their vote base is the same as ours and if we get back in alliance with them now, we will inherit all the taints and failures that Kejriwal is currently accused of... if we stand on our own, we may at least start the process of revival.”

A section of Delhi Congress leaders also believes AAP has “lost the confidence of Muslim voters in Delhi”, particularly after the Kejriwal government’s appalling response to the 2020 north-east Delhi riots and the anti-CAA protests at Shaheen Bagh.

The Muslims play a decisive role in nearly a dozen assembly segments spread across Chandni Chowk, east and north-east Delhi Lok Sabha seats. A senior Delhi Congress leader pointed out that AAP had conceded the Chandni Chowk and north-east Delhi seats to the Congress in the Lok Sabha seat-sharing talks “primarily because it knew that it would not fare well in the Muslim-dominated pockets, where the Congress had regained its acceptability.”