Kejriwal says Muslims voted for Cong in Delhi

Hinting that the AAP may not do well in the Lok Sabha elections in Delhi, party supremo Arvind Kejriwal said that Muslims have voted en bloc to Congress at the last minute even as he accused the BJP of getting him assassinated by his own guard.

Kejriwal shared this assessment with a newspaper on Friday during his campaign in Punjab where AAP is fighting all the seats. He made the sensational allegation of his Indira Gandhi-style assassination to a news channel on Saturday.

"Until 48 hours before polling, it seemed like all seven seats will come to AAP. But at the last moment, the complete Muslim vote got shifted to the Congress. We are trying to figure out what happened," he was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

Asked for her comments on Muslims voting pattern, Delhi Congress chief and former chief minister Sheila Dikshit said, "don't know what is he trying to say. Everyone has a right to vote whichever party he or she wants to vote. People of Delhi did not understand nor liked his governance model."

Akshay Marathe, an AAP media panellist who was involved in East Delhi candidate Atishi's campaign, defended Kejriwal's statement saying he was merely making an observation and there was no blaming of any community.

"Muslims have a decisive vote on three seats. So secular parties hope to get their votes. When that doesn't happen, obviously internal calculations go awry. Arvind Kejriwal has merely made an observation about which way the Muslim vote went. How does that amount to blaming?" he tweeted.

While talking to a news channel in Punjab during his campaign, he expressed fear that the BJP would get him “murdered by my own PSO (Personal Security Officer) one day like Indira Gandhi”.

“My own security officers report to BJP... The BJP is after my life, they will murder me one day," Kejriwal claimed.

These statements were interpreted in political circles as Kejriwal preparing defence of his party's anticipated poor performance. With Delhi Assembly elections scheduled early next year, AAP feels that a bad performance would impact its chances.

During the campaign in Delhi, anti-BJP voters from Muslim and Scheduled Caste communities, which had moved from the Congress to the AAP, have said that they would decide on their choice towards the polling day as they wanted to gauge who could win against the BJP. Both Congress and the AAP fought for these votes but there were indications that Muslims were moving towards the Congress.

AAP and Congress were locked in intense negotiations till the last minute before the last day of filing nominations to enter into an alliance but it could not materialise as the latter was not keen on extending the coalition to Haryana and Chandigarh.

Kejriwal had then said that an alliance in Delhi can happen only if the Congress was ready to spare seats in Haryana and Chandigarh, triggering a war of words on who was responsible for the break up.

Both the parties had agreed that a triangular fight in Delhi would result in division of anti-BJP votes and benefit for the saffron party, which was aiming to retain all the seven seats it won in 2014 Lok Sabha elections.