JOIN USEuphoria appeared to be making way for responsible action among the leaders and supporters of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday, a day after the debutant party turned Delhi politics on its head by winning 28 Assembly seats.
The usual scenes of ecstatic volunteers, wearing their trademark white Nehru caps with slogans of swaraj on them, dancing and celebrating their party’s victory were missing outside the party’s office at Hanuman Road in New Delhi, while the newly elected legislators spent a lot of time attending party meetings.
The AAP’s young army, closely linked through the social media, seemed to have returned to the barracks after catapulting their party into a position that would determine the future of the next Delhi government.
“The feeling (of victory) is taking its time to sink in,” said a volunteer outside the office of the party’s Malviya Nagar candidate Somnath Bharati.
Bharati was among some victorious AAP volunteers who took out victory processions in their constituencies.
Waving at people, Bharati, a lawyer by profession, took a round of Malviya Nagar colony in an open jeep decorated with marigold flower.
AAP’s victorious candidate from the Jangpura seat, Maninder Singh Dheer, said he was yet to start celebrations in his constituency.
“We were busy holding discussions with Arvind Kejriwal today,” he said, adding that he will be distributing sweets in my constituency on Tuesday.
The sea of volunteers of the AAP who swarmed the vote counting centres, party’s office on Hanuman Road and Arvind Kejriwal’s residence in Koshambi colony in the neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, seemed to be gradually thinning away. “Our job is done,” said one volunteer spotted near the Bangla Sahib gurdwara in the heart of the capital. The discussions among the new party’s legislators continued till 6 in the evening. The message that emerged from party’s internal talks was that the party, if invited by Lt Governor Najeeb Jung, to form the government will refuse the offer. The AAP’s identity is inextricably interlinked with that its 45-year-old leader Arvind Kejriwal, who took to politics after a stint as a transparency activist. The engineer-turned-civil servant, who beat Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit of the Congress, avoided news hounds through the day.
Kejriwal launched the AAP on November 26 last year.