Aam Aadmi Party national general secretary (organisation) and Rajya Sabha MP Sandeep Pathak on Tuesday, June 25, 2024, sounded the poll bugle for the upcoming Assembly election in the State at the party’s workers meet in Karnal with a call for “badlav (change)”.
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He also announced the launch of 15-day-long “Jan Samvad” programme for the party workers and leaders to interact with the electorate in the villages to ascertain their expectations and aspirations.
Giving the call for a “complete change” in the State with just over a hundred days to go for the polls, Mr. Pathak said it would not be enough to change the “brakes, steering and wheels, and there was a need to change the complete vehicle” to bring about a meaningful difference in the governance.
Refraining from naming the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, he said the people of Haryana had given ten years each to both major parties in the State, but it had not brought any visible difference to their lives with the government schools, and hospitals being in pathetic conditions and the unemployed youth pushed into drug-addiction or forced to go abroad through illegal means in search of livelihood.
The AAP had contested the Kurukshetra Lok Sabha constituency election as part of the INDIA bloc with its candidate and Haryana president Sushil Gupta losing to BJP’s Naveen Jindal by a margin of over 29,000 votes, but there is no word on any alliance for the State election.
In 2019, the AAP contested four Lok Sabha seats in coalition with Jannayak Janata Party, but drew a blank. It fielded candidates on 46 out of 90 Assembly seats a few months later, but finished behind NOTA with 0.48% vote share.
Mr. Pathak said the workers in Haryana continued to remain connected to the party despite it not contesting the elections in the State in full earnest so far showing that the roots of the organisation were “deep” in the State. Making an appeal to the people to rise above caste politics and vote for the future of their children, he stressed that the party must get an opportunity in Haryana, a native State of its national convenor Arvind Kejriwal, when the people in other States had shown faith in it.
He took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the alleged irregularities in NEET exam saying that they talked about making India the world leader, but could not conduct an exam properly. He said the party had lost elections to all those places associated with Lord Ram.
Mr. Kejriwal’s wife Sunita Kejriwal could not make it to the meet being busy with his bail hearing at Delhi High Court, said Mr. Pathak.
