The Kalkaji assembly constituency is witnessing a triangular contest between political heavyweights, with Delhi Chief Minister Atishi seeking her second term as MLA while the Congress has fielded All India Mahila Congress chief Alka Lamba, and the BJP has nominated two-time former MP from South Delhi, Ramesh Bidhuri.

Kalkaji, once a Congress stronghold from where the party won it three times out of the total eight elections, AAP has been winning it for the last two elections while the saffron party and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) has represented it one time each.

Advertisement

In the 2020 elections, Atishi, then a first time MLA, defeated her near rival Dharambir of BJP with a margin of 11 thousand votes while the Congress candidate, Shivani Chopra could only manage four thousand votes and stood third.

The constituency has two sides of voters, the first lives in posh areas such as new friends colony, East of Kailash, Maharani Bagh having wide and clean roads, who are mostly Sikh, Punjabi voters who migrated from Pakistan after partition while the other lives in JJ cluster areas such as Sriniwaspuri near the Okhla railway station, Govindpuri and other nearby areas. The voters living here are mostly migrants from Purvanchal and West Bengal, whose support the AAP has enjoyed in the last assembly election.

Notably, the purvanchal voters living in JJ clusters have influence in the constituency as their decision to align with AAP helped the party in the last two elections while Congress had enjoyed such support before 2013 assembly elections.

Both BJP and AAP are engaged in a constant war of words as AAP National Convenor Arvind Kejriwal had claimed that the saffron party will make Bidhuri its CM face on the other hand, the saffron party nominee has made several derogatory remarks on Atishi and by doing so, Bidhuri kind of tried to grab media attention.

Bidhuri belongs to the Gurjar community and has represented Tughlaqabad thrice but the case dynamics does not fit for him here as it used to be on the earlier seat given the fact that Kalkaji has a good number of Sikh and Punjabi voters.

The third candidate in the fray, Congress’ Lamba is targeting Atishi and Bidhuri both by calling out both for neglecting the constituency as the condition of roads and other civic amenities are in sorry state.