Saffron party banking on high turnout

The BJP is counting on high voter turnout on Saturday to win the Delhi Assembly polls. Sources said the party is hoping election fatigue does not hit the people of Delhi, who will be voting for the third time in the last 13 months. 

The party is hoping that the people come out to exercise their franchise in the same manner as they did in 2013 Assembly polls. In 2013, the voters came out in record numbers to achieve 66.5 per cent polling, the best ever for Delhi. The party leaders are hoping for longer queues before polling booths as it would indicate that its core voters, the middle class and elite, are coming out to vote for them. 

The high voter turnout in the capital during the 2013 December Assembly polls and four months later in the Lok Sabha polls happened due to a wave in favour of Narendra Modi. 

In the Lok Sabha polls, the turnout in Delhi was 64 per cent. With the Modi wave settling down, the party is banking on its cadres–who are not that motivated as they were on previous occasions, some state leaders believe–to fetch out voters from their houses on a cold winter day.

The party is also firing all cylinders, trying to hunt down Arvind Kejriwal by calling him “habitual liar” and “perpetual absconder”, and latest on the “dubious” political funding.

In his last political rally a day before campaigning ends, Modi again attacked AAP for accepting donations from dubious sources. 

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley wrote a piece, which stated: “If Kejriwal were still a Revenue Service officer and a case of such money conversion through sham companies resulting in donations to a political party had landed on his table, what he would have done?  Would he have asked the assessee to write a letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India or allowed him to argue that a payment by cheque to political parties forgives all sins of black money conversion?”

“Would he have arrested the fraudulent assessee under the Indian Penal Code rather than proceeding under the Income Tax Act?  Surely Kejriwal is not a stranger to the tax laws.  He knew what his party was doing. He should be honest enough to tell the people what Arvind Kejriwal, IRS would have done under these circumstances?” the finance minister concluded.