Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari today said Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has a record of willfully committing mistakes and then seeking an apology.
His remarks came after Kejriwal admitted that his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) made “mistakes” and that there was a need to “introspect” and “course correct”.
“If you look back, whether it was fighting the Lok Sabha elections or forming a government in Delhi for 49 days, he has been knowingly committing mistakes and pulling the stunt of apologising,” Tiwari said.
The AAP has suffered a string of defeats since last two months. It performed far below expectations in Punjab, drew a blank in Goa, forfeited its deposit in the Rajouri Garden by- poll and lost miserably in MCD polls.
Breaking his silence over back-to-back defeats, Kejriwal today said that based on his interactions with “volunteers and voters”, it was obvious that the party made mistakes and there was a need to go back to the “drawing board”.
Till now, he had been blaming Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) for the party’s rout in polls.
Some of the AAP leaders, including Kumar Vishwas and Lok Sabha MP Bhagwant Mann, have even suggested the party to desist from holding EVMs as the sole reason for its drubbings.
“There has been a communication gap between volunteers and the party leadership. We should first decide whom did we start our fight with. (Is it) corruption, the Congress, Narendra Modi or the EVMs,” Vishwas, a member of party’s top decision making body, the Political Affairs Committee, had said in an interview to a TV news channel.
Kejriwal’s party faced disastrous results in Goa in March when AAP could not win a single seat. Contrary to its expectation to form the government in Punjab, the party could barely manage to win 20 plus seats in alliance with Lok Insaaf Party.
In Delhi, where it won a historic mandate in February 2015, the party’s candidate lost his deposit in Rajouri Garden assembly bypoll earlier this month.
And, in the just concluded civic body polls, AAP could emerge victorious on just 48 seats out of 270 plus wards.
While assessing the poll debacle for AAP, Janta Ka Reporter’s editor-in-chief, Rifat Jawaid, had written on 14 April, “Going forward, if Kejriwal and AAP need to stay relevant in politics, this will require an urgent course correction. In corporate jargon, it’s called returning to the drawing board. Kejriwal must return to being the leader he was before the 2015 assembly elections. He ought to become a hands-on politician and stop surrounding himself by so-called ‘advisors’, who, truth be told, are nothing but a bunch of sycophants.”
(With PTI inputs)