NEW DELHI: All eyes are on the Northeast Delhi parliamentary constituency, where the heads of the local units of two big national parties—Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—are in the fray. This was acknowledged by the BJP’s incumbent Member of Parliament from the seat, Manoj Tiwari, who is seeking re-election.
Tiwari, the Delhi BJP chief, is facing a challenge from Sheila Dikshit of the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party’s Dilip Pandey. Dikshit is president of the Congress in Delhi.
“The entry of former chief minister Dikshit into the poll fray has spiced up the contest in my constituency. This has become one of the most interesting fights in the Lok Sabha elections, as the Delhi unit presidents of two national parties are pitted against each other,” the Bhojpuri actor-turned-politician said on Friday.
In 2014, Tiwari secured nearly six lakh votes, defeating his nearest rival, Professor Anand Kumar of AAP, by a margin of around 1.5 lakh votes.
Tiwari said he was in a direct contest with Dikshit, and the AAP candidate was nowhere in the picture.
“Like other constituencies in the national capital, the BJP and Congress are locked in a straight contest while the AAP will be a distant third,” he said.
The BJP wrested all seven Lok Sabha seats from the Congress in 2014. Pandey is a senior AAP leader who was earlier in charge of the party’s Delhi unit. Northeast Delhi Lok Sabha seat, which shares its limits with the eastern bank of Yamuna and western Uttar Pradesh, is densely populated.
The Lok Sabha segment comprises about 22.5 lakh voters, which makes it the third largest constituency in terms of electorate. The majority of the voters are from the Muslim and Purvanchali communities.
Pandey, a former software engineer, and Tiwari come from the same region, and are the known Purvanchali faces in their respective parties.
Congress candidate Jai Prakash Agarwal could get only 2.14 lakh votes in 2014.
After Dikshit decided to contest from the Northeast Delhi Lok Sabha seat, Agarwal was shifted to Chandni Chowk, where he had won elections twice, in 1984 and 1996.
“I am the only candidate who has covered almost each part of the constituency and met voters door to door. As far as Tiwari is concerned, he has exploited the sentiments of the Purvanchali people but done nothing for them,” Pandey told PTI.
Diskhit had earlier said that every seat in Delhi was important but she had an emotional connect with Northeast Delhi as she had contested her first election in the city from the same seat in 1996.
“Whoever is contesting against a candidate is a challenge; be it the BJP or AAP. I have worked a lot in the region during my tenure as chief minister in Delhi. I am hopeful that the Congress will win all the seven seats,” she said.