New Delhi: Sandeep Dikshit, former MP and son of Delhi’s longest-serving chief minister, Sheila Dikshit, is likely to fight AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal for the New Delhi assembly seat. Congress party released its first list of 21 candidates on Thursday, giving tickets to senior functionaries, including Dikshit, former minister Haroon Yusuf for the Ballimaran constituency, state president Devendra Yadav for the Badli seat, and national secretary Abhishek Dutt for the Kasturba Nagar constituency.
Ending the speculation that AAP and Congress could fight the coming assembly polls in alliance, the Congress’s central election committee chaired by party president Mallikarjun Kharge and attended by senior MP Rahul Gandhi, among others, named Dikshit for the New Delhi seat. Though AAP is yet to announce the candidate from the constituency, it is certain that three-time representative Kejriwal will again stand from his ‘home’ constituency. He first won the seat in 2013, defeating sitting CM Dikshit.
Dikshit represented the East Delhi parliamentary constituency twice in 2004 and 2009. He lost to BJP’s Maheish Girri in 2014 and in 2019, his mother fought from the seat but lost to BJP’s Manoj Tiwari. Dikshit was eyeing the seat again in the 2024 general elections, but it fell in the AAP’s quota.
Sandeep Dikshit has emerged as a harsh critic of AAP and Kejriwal. After AAP and Congress failed to win any Lok Sabha seats in Delhi as INDIA bloc contestants, he commented that such partnerships wouldn’t help Congress regain its foothold in Delhi. Congress is keen to re-establish its presence in Delhi, having failed to secure any seats in the previous two assembly elections of 2015 and 2020.
Among other prominent candidates who have received tickets is former councillor Dutt. Though he lost the 2020 assembly polls on a Congress ticket, he was among the few Congress leaders not to have forfeited his security deposit. Both AAP and BJP tried hard to lure Dutt to their camps ahead of the polls.
Dutt said on Thursday, “I urge the people of Delhi to vote on the performance of their elected representatives. Why did AAP not repeat their sitting MLAs and BJP, their sitting MPs? Because they did not work for the constituency. Their performance hindered development in the areas.”
Former state president Chaudhary Anil Kumar has been nominated from Patparganj and will contest against AAP’s Awadh Ojha, a civil service teacher who recently joined the party. BJP has not declared a candidate for any seat till now.
Yadav will contest from Badli as he had in 2020, when ended in the third position, with AAP’s Ajesh Yadav winning the seat.
AAP MLA Abdul Rehman who recently joined Congress has got the ticket for Seelampur. He will be contesting against AAP newcomer Chaudhary Zubair Ahmad, son of five-time Congress MLA Mateen Ahmed. Adarsh Shastri, grandson of late PM Lal Bahadur Shastri, is the nominee from Dwarka again. He had won in 2015 as an AAP candidate but lost in 2020 after joining Congress.
Others on the Congress list include Aruna Kumari (Narela), Mangesh Tyagi (Burari), Shivank Singhal (Adarsh Nagar), Jai Kishan (Sultanpur Majra-SC), Jay Prakash (Ambedkar Nagar-SC) and Haroon Yusuf (Ballimaran).
