NARENDRA PUPPALA

Bengaluru, Oct 15,2022:  With assembly elections due in a few months, the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress party have got into pre-poll mode in Karnataka.

On the one hand Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is criss-crossing the state as part of his ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’. On the other, the ruling BJP has launched its ‘Jana Sankalpa Yatra’. The arrival on the scene of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), though, is widely expected to change the contours of the forthcoming elections which has so far seen a three-cornered fight between the BJP, the Congress, and the Janata Dal (S).

“While the others are doing Bharat Jodo and Jana Sankalpa Yatras , we are working very quietly because people see through these gimmicks. When Covid struck nobody cared. When people died due to potholes nobody cared, when people struggled with floods nobody cared. So only by starting yatras people’s perceptions are not going to change,” AAP Karnataka convenor Prithvi Reddy told IANS.

After its sensational electoral victories in Delhi, the AAP went on to sweep the Punjab assembly polls and has set its eye on the just announced Gujarat polls. Down south, the party is making concerted efforts to stand out as a viable option in Karnataka.

Currently, the two principal parties in the state – the BJP and the Congress – are busy attacking each other on the corruption issue, something which the AAP is looking to capitalise upon.

Reddy elaborated: “People of Karnataka had the choice of three parties but the choice of only one kind of politics. The 40 percent corruption charges are not random charges but these are very serious accusations made by a cross-section of people like contractors association, pontiffs of mutts, the private schools association.”

“The opposition parties in any other state would have taken the ruling party to the cleaners, whether it’s raising the issue of floods or issue of potholes in Bengaluru or the farm laws. If the government has failed, the opposition has failed equally. So Karnataka needs an Opposition. Though we are small we are growing. I believe that what was an aspiration for good politics will become a necessity today because it started affecting people’s lives today.”

Prithvi Reddy says it’s definitely going to be a four-cornered fight in Karnataka this time. However he clarifies that the ideological lines are clearly drawn between the AAP and the others.

“We’re not here to fight the BJP or the Congress. We’re here to fight their politics. In essence it’s a two way fight between their politics which has three parties and our politics. So it’s a two way fight between two different politics and philosophies.”

Faced with the massive electoral machinery that the existing players have in place in Karnataka, the AAP has set out to strengthen its grassroots presence ahead of the assembly polls due sometime around May 2023.

Prithvi Reddy says that the AAP will field candidates in all the 224 constituencies of Karnataka. To begin with, the party has launched a program to put in place 10-member booth committees in 58,000 polling booths across the state.

“Our reading is that people want change. We believe in the Delhi model as against the Gujarat model. Whether the goodwill we have will convert into votes, only time will tell. Because whenever you launch a product no matter how good or bad it is, you need people to buy it,” Reddy pointed out.

“So from what ground reactions we are getting, we are positive. There is goodwill but we need to convert it into votes and that’s what we are doing today,” he concluded.