NEW DELHI: The Congress, which is keen on sewing up an anti-Modi alliance at the national level, has said it will not join hands with the Aam Aadmi Party for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in Delhi."We have decided not to have any alliance with the AAP in Delhi. There are two specific reasons for it," Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken told this paper. "First, the people of Delhi are rejecting them and second, that they, together with the RSS and activist Anna Hazare, helped Modi come to power at the centre," he said.
He was referring to the 2011 anti-corruption movement launched by Hazare and his former close aide Arvind Kejriwal (AAP founder and Delhi chief minister) along with the RSS, which led to the decimation of the Congress government in Delhi in 2013 and the UPA government at the centre in 2014.
Congress managers said they made a blunder in 2013 by supporting the AAP government, which lasted only for 49 days, to keep the BJP out as the move led to the complete rout of the party in the national capital where it failed to win even a single seat in the 2015 assembly polls against the eight MLAs it had of the total 70 in 2013.
Since then the Congress managers have viewed the AAP with suspicion and are opposed to having a truck with them for the 2019 national polls.In fact, this sentiment was reflected when the Congress did not invite Arvind Kejriwal for Rahul Gandhi's Iftar hosted on June 13 for which over a dozen opposition parties were invited."AAP and BJP are hand in glove though they pretend to fight in public.
AAP contests only in those states where the Congress has an upper hand against the BJP," a senior AICC functionary said. He cited the 2017 assembly polls in Punjab and Goa as examples saying AAP divided the anti-BJP votes in the two states and listed Kejriwal's plans to contest the coming Rajasthan polls (where Congress' hopes are high) while leaving out Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh