The political battle in Delhi’s Bijwasan assembly is an interesting one as AAP nominee Surender Bharadwaj is set to take on his party’s two former colleagues, BJP’s Kailash Gehlot and Congress’ Devinder Sherawat.

Located in South West Delhi and divided by Delhi-Gurugram highway, the seat has been won twice by AAP and once by BJP in the last three elections. It came to light in 2020 as AAP’s Bhupinder Singh Joon won it by a narrow margin of 753 votes by defeating BJP’s Sat Prakash Rana.

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In the 2015 elections, AAP candidate Devinder Sehrawat won the seat. He polled 65,006 votes while BJP candidate Sat Prakash Rana got 45,470 votes and Congress candidate Vijay Singh Lochav could only manage 5, 258 votes.

This time, BJP has denied ticket to Rana and AAP replaced incumbent MLA BS Joon. Interestingly, Sherawat is now a congress nominee and Gehlot is the nominee from Saffron party, both belonging to the Jat community which holds a prominent position in deciding the fate of leaders’ on this seat.

There are 11 villages out of which eight are Jat majority, two Yadav and one Brahmin majority village. In addition to this, it has a mixed population of migrants from Purvanchal and Uttarakhand among others.

The issues here, like all other parts of Delhi, are poor roads, and less connectivity of DTC buses. Moreover, the villages in the assembly face problems of basic civic infrastructure and the villagers had even vowed to boycott the assembly election during ‘Gaon Dehat Bachao Yatra’ under the banner of Palam 360 khap leader Surender Chouhdary.

The candidates here are banking on their respective parties’ manifestos, especially BJP and AAP. For AAP the biggest challenge lies after it denied ticket to incumbent MLA BS Joon and fielding a Brahmin face which does not fit in the caste equation here. However, Bhardwaj is sticking to the development works done by the AAP government in the city and seeking votes on the same.

While BJP nominee Kailash Gehlot, a parachute candidate, depended on Sat Prakash Rana, who vowed to support him after losing narrowly in the last election and BJP’s attack on the AAP for its misdeeds.

Moreover, Congress candidate Sherawat is contesting the election by highlighting his development works as MLA from here from 2015 to 2020.