Eyeing Gujarat, Himachal polls, AAP goes with Yashwant Sinha for President | Political Pulse News,The Indian Express
The AAP's pledge to support Yashwant Sinha would ensure he gets over 4 lakh votes, even as Droupadi Murmu is comfortably poised to sail through the election by expectedly garnering at least 6.60 lakh votes.
After keeping everyone guessing for nearly a month, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Saturday announced its support for the joint Opposition’s candidate Yashwant Sinha in the July 18 Presidential election, infusing some energy in the dispirited Opposition camp whose presidential campaign had seemed to be unravelling.
The Delhi Chief Minister and AAP national convenor, Arvind Kejriwal, chaired a meeting of the 11-member AAP Political Affairs Committee (PAC), the party’s highest decision-making body, at his residence during the day, where it was decided that the AAP’s MLAs and MPs will vote for Sinha for the President’s post.
On June 21, after declaring Sinha’s candidature, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)’s supremo Sharad Pawar had told reporters that the AAP, despite staying away from the Opposition’s meetings on the issue, will back the former Union minister in the Presidential poll. The Kejriwal-led party, however, chose not to reveal its cards till the eleventh hour. In fact, when Sinha visited Chandigarh earlier this week as part of his whirlwind tour across states for his campaign, he did not have any meeting with the AAP’s Punjab MLAs, which kept the suspense alive.
“The AAP will contest the Assembly polls in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh this year, where the BJP is in power and the Congress is the principal Opposition. It made no sense for the party to give a handle to the Congress to whip up the narrative that AAP is BJP’s B-team,” a senior AAP leader told The Indian Express.
The AAP is, however, also mindful of the symbolism projected by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP)-led NDA’s Presidential nominee Droupadi Murmu, who is set to become the country’s first-ever tribal occupant of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. So while announcing the decision to support Sinha’s candidature, the party leader and Rajya Sabha MP, Sanjay Singh, sought to address this aspect of the Presidential contest too.
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