BJP Delhi to get new team soon

After facing defeat in the Delhi assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is set to revamp its Delhi unit, sources have said.

Delhi will also be getting a new state unit president because the organisational elections did not take place due to the assembly polls. Within a month, the entire team of Delhi BJP will be in place, they said.

According to sources, it has also been decided that this time an experienced leader would be chosen as the state unit president instead of a celebrity leader.

And this time an experienced leader, enjoying the status of celebrity, will be given the command of the Delhi unit presidentship.

In the BJP's internal meeting, Home Minister Amit Shah admitted that his assessment was the Congress will get 18 to 20 per cent of the votes in about 20 seats in Delhi and this will directly benefit the BJP to form the government with a majority.

However, this assessment proved wrong. Now the BJP will start working to get 51 per cent vote share by completely bypassing the Congress in Delhi.

It was also revealed in the internal meeting that the votes of the Sikh and Punjabi community from Pakistan also went to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). However, Purvanchali voters in big numbers voted for the BJP in the Delhi assembly elections.

But the BJP suffered a huge setback on the 12 seats of reserved category and now the new organisational set up will have due representation from these sections of the society as the leaders contesting on these seats are losing from the last three elections. Hence new faces will be brought to these seats.

Factionalism, gaps in coordination at the local level and inability to effectively counter AAP's narrative of freebies are among the reasons identified by the BJP leaders for the party's defeat in Delhi assembly polls.

The BJP has held introspection meetings to ascertain the causes for its defeat in the elections in which the ruling Aam Aadmi Party posted a landslide victory for the second time in a row.

BJP president JP Nadda on Wednesday chaired a meeting of senior party functionaries at the party headquarters here to discuss organisational elections and other issues.

Present in the meeting were Ram Madhav, Muralidhar Rao, BL Santhosh, Bhupendra Yadav, and Arun Singh among others.

The meeting took place a day after the AAP retained power in Delhi with a thumping a majority in 70-member Assembly. The BJP was restricted to single-digit despite launching a high-voltage election campaign spearheaded by Union Home Minister Shah.

The Congress failed to open its account second time in a row in the national capital. AAP, led by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, has won 62 seats, while the BJP 8.