Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate Atishi is in a close contest against her Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) opponent Dharambir Singh in Kalkaji constituency in south Delhi. According to Election Commission, after three rounds of counting, Singh has got 8396 votes and Atishi has got 8205 votes.
She is trailing with 191 votes.
Though the margin is narrow, and many more rounds of counting are left, the development is a setback for Atishi (38). She had unsuccessfully contested the Lok Sabha polls from East Delhi in 2019.
Apart from Atishi and Dharambir Singh, Delhi Congress chief Subhash Chopra’s daughter Shivani Chopra is also in the fray from Kalkaji. This is Chopra’s first election.
Atishi, an Oxford graduate, is credited for the education reforms in Delhi government schools. A resident of Jangpura Extension, where her parents live, Atishi has of late been staying in a house (a rented accommodation) at Kalkaji’s L-block.
She is relying heavily on the work done by the AAP government as well as her Punjabi connect to woo the middle-class voters, largely Sikh-Punjabi.
The three main political parties are vying for slum votes, which account for around 25 per cent of the voter base with the largest being Navjeevan, Bhomiheen and Nehru camps in Govindpuri.
In the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections, Avtar Singh Kalkaji of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) defeated Harmeet Singh Kalka of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by a margin of 19,769 votes in Kalkaji.
Kalkaji Assembly constituency had 1,64,240 electors in 2015, out of which 92,023 were male and 72,206 female. Kalkaji witnessed 64.9 per cent voter turnout in the 2015 Delhi Assembly polls.
The counting of votes for 70 seats of the Delhi Assembly began amid tight security at 8 am today.
Delhi went to polls in a single-phase on February 8.
AAP, BJP, Congress are the main political parties in the fray. The primary fight is between the ruling AAP and the BJP which is seeking to make a reentry into the state politics in the national capital after over 20 years.