Presidential poll: AAP to meet in New Delhi to decide strategy

Jupinderjit Singh

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 29

The Aam Aadmi Party will meet on Thursday evening in New Delhi to decide on the candidate they will vote for the post of the President. The political affairs committee will meet at the residence of party national chief Arvind Kejriwal to deliberate on the issue.

The President’s election is on July 17. The choice is between NDA’s nominee Ram Nath Kovind and UPA nominee Meira Kumar. The AAP usually takes a different political view than the Congress-led UPA and the BJP-led NDA.

MP Bhagwant Mann, who is also head of the Punjab unit of the AAP, told The Tribune that though the party had four MPs in Parliament, it had 67 MLAs in Delhi and 18 MLAs besides two MLAs of alliance partner, Lok Insaf Party, in Punjab.

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Under the president election system, all MPs (excluding the nominated ones) and MLAs are treated as electoral college. Each vote has the value corresponding to the population of the state they represent. The value of a MP’s vote is larger than an MLA as he represents a larger population.

Mann said the political affairs committee would be meeting under the chairmanship of national convener Arvind Kejriwal.

Mann, meanwhile, criticised the Capt Amarinder Singh government in the state for their “attempt to throttle democracy”. He said Speaker Rana KP Singh murdered democracy by ordering out the AAP MLAs from the House.

“It is strange that the members of the same Congress party create ruckus in Parliament when they don’t get time to speak. They allege that it is murder of democracy as they are not allowed to speak in the House but the same party takes the opposite view when in power in Punjab,” he said.

Mann said the AAP in Punjab played the role of true opposition while the Akalis just tried scoring brownie points on different issues. “The Akalis have shown most disrespect to Sikhism and the turban but they tried to make themselves champion saviours of the Sikh religion in the Assembly.”

He said the AAP would fight for the respect of the turban.