Post Debacle, Will Humbled Kiran Bedi Work For BJP?

CM candidate said she will honour speaking engagements in Oxford and Cambridge if she loses.

The trends suggest Bharatiya Janata Party’s chief ministerial candidate Kiran Bedi is trailing in Krishna Nagar, an assembly seat in Delhi that her party has never lost. Even if she ends up actually winning the seat, she has still failed: her party, which she was meant to lead in the assembly, is on course for an unprecedented loss.

Less than a year after it swept all seven parliamentary seats in the capital with a 46% vote share, the BJP is now looking at barely seven seats in the 70-strong assembly.


What this means for Kiran Bedi is an open question. The knives were out for the former anti-corruption activist from the very beginning, with other BJP leaders calling her a “thanedaar” and questioning the need to bring an outsider into the unit and putting her in such a prominent position. Naturally, these questions are set to become even louder, as a Delhi BJP unit asserts the prominence of the loyalists over a “parachute CM”.

Bedi has come out and admitted responsibility, but the chips have yet to fully fall here. For one, the Delhi BJP unit remains in a shambles. The lack of serious contenders within the state BJP was the reason that the party was reluctant to ask for elections immediately after its massive popularity in the aftermath of the Lok Sabha polls. The Delhi BJP leaders might have been angry at an outsider coming in, but it was their incompetence that prompted the national leadership to move towards a fresh face in the first place.

However, rumours suggested that bickering continued throughout the run up to the elections, with murmurs that faction members were deliberately sabotaging Bedi's chances. The loyalists will feel vindicated, but it is a bitter victory for them: the party appears to have been routed and there still is no clear path to a recovery.

And what about Bedi herself? One of the main questions asked by those within the BJP irked at the arrival of an outsider was just how committed Bedi would be to the party’s cause. Fortunately, the defeated chief ministerial candidate herself answered this question to the Times of India during the campaign, when asked what she would do if she loses:

I've a lot of speaking engagements on hold from Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge or Columbia. All are on hold. So while remaining a member of the BJP I will go back to my speaking engagements and go back with my trust to Nav Jyoti and India Vision Foundation which are my children which I had to resign from.