NEW DELHI: Moving ahead with its Lok Sabha campaign, the Aam Aadmi Party announced that about 1.5 lakh Vijay Pramukhs were tasked with the responsibility of taking the message of the party across national capital under statehood campaign. The AAP has made a list of 14-star campaigners for the general elections.
AAP national convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his entire cabinet along with prominent faces such as Dilip Pandey, MLAs Rakhi Birla, Jarnail Singh and Saurabh Bhardwaj figure in the list.
According to the party, a total of 40-star campaigners will extensively wage the poll battle against the BJP and the Congress. Rajya Sabha MPs Sanjay Singh, Sushil Gupta and ND Gupta have also been named in the list along with Shahnaz Hindustani.
Each of the Vijay Pramukhs will be responsible for reaching out to 10 households in the area. These foot soldiers of the party are being used extensively to develop a mass connect to the network with voters at the micro level — a plan that draws its lessons from BJP’s concept of ‘Panna Pramukh’.
There are no pre-conditions for becoming a Vijay Pramukh. “Anyone can aspire to become a Vijay Pramukh and will be given the responsibility to hand out the voter slips to voters and to cull out any false or misleading information on the ground,” said senior AAP leader and Delhi Cabinet minister Gopal Rai.
Attack on Sheila
Rai attacked Delhi Congress president Sheila Dikshit over her comments on statehood. He also asked the opposition Congress as to why it has taken a U-turn on the matter just like the BJP.
“It is shocking that somebody who has been a CM is today saying that the statehood for Delhi cannot be an issue for the Lok Sabha elections. If one were to believe what Dikshit is saying, then on what basis she had got a resolution passed from the Assembly and sent it to the then central government for getting this demand fulfilled?” asked Rai.
Statehood for Delhi is the prime agenda of the AAP in this election. The issue was taken up by the previous BJP and Congress governments but both have failed to take any major decision.
“The youth of Delhi is facing job issues because of BJP and Congress policies. I as a labour minister cannot hire one person… In the Delhi government alone, there are 2 lakh vacancies which can be filled but the government has not been given powers (to make appointments),” said Rai.
“Should Delhi believe her (Dikshit’s) latest statement or her earlier statement of 21st November 2013, when she had stated that due to Delhi not being a full state, there has been a problem of coordination between different agencies.”
Time-tested model that gave success to BJP
The BJP’s Panna Pramukh model was first used in Gujarat where the saffron party rode to power for three successive terms. The RSS went on to implement it in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections