Delhi, the city-state (technically union territory), will go to the polls on February 5. The Incumbent Aam Admi Party (AAP) will be looking to secure power for the third time in a row in these elections. Its primary challenger, the BJP, will be hoping to end the hiatus between its performance in national and state elections. In the last two Lok Sabha and assembly elections held in Delhi, the BJP and AAP have secured overwhelming victories over each other in the former and the latter.

The only logical explanation of this political promiscuity of a large share of Delhi’s voters, as has been argued by Neelanjan Sircar in these pages, is that they prefer (welfare) delivery over (Hindu) identity when it comes to choosing a state government. The question in these elections is whether this pattern will continue to hold. Given the fact that the BJP has shifted its stance from criticising to embracing freebies in many recent state elections, the question remains whether the BJP will make similar promises in Delhi and it would lead to voters ditching the AAP to choose BJP’s welfare measures along with its ideological appeal. There is no point speculating about it and we will know the answer on February 8 when the votes are counted. However, even if this were to happen it would only underline rather than negate AAP’s core politics.

This column, however, wants to make a larger point. That India is a vastly unequal country which has hundreds of millions of people living in extreme precarity, if not statistically defined poverty, is well known. We had to give free food grain to 800 million people during the pandemic to make sure that, there is no other way to put it, they survived. But all of us like to believe that this proverbial wretched........

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