On Friday, tensions boiled over during a meeting of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to elect a new mayor, as councilors from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) clashed. The altercation reportedly started when a disagreement arose between the two parties over the order in which oaths were to be taken during the first meeting of the House. The mayoral election has been postponed until further notice due to the altercation.
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) was scheduled to hold elections for Delhi’s next mayor and deputy mayor on Friday, with provisional election IDs having been issued to all 250 municipal councilors eligible to vote. However, the mayoral polls were disrupted when a physical altercation broke out between councilors from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The councillors reportedly pushed and hit each other while raising slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
The scuffle between the AAP and BJP councillors during the mayoral election of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) began when BJP councilor and Presiding Officer Satya Sharma invited alderman Manoj Kumar to take the oath. AAP leaders argued that elected councilors should be sworn in before nominated members. The first meeting of the newly-constituted MCD was held in the presence of Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena at the Aruna Asif Ali Sabhagar in New Delhi’s Dr. SP Mukherjee Civic Centre. The AAP had nominated Shelly Oberoi and Ashu Thakur (backup candidate) to run against the BJP’s Rekha Gupta for the mayor’s post, with nominees for the deputy mayor’s post being Aaley Mohammad Iqbal and Jalaj Kumar from AAP and Kamal Bagri from BJP.
The mayoral elections for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) are being held just one month after the December 4 MCD polls, in which the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) emerged victorious and ended the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) 15-year reign over the civic body. During the 2022 MCD elections, the AAP won 134 seats while the BJP won 104. The Congress party, on the other hand, won only nine wards in the 250-member municipal body. Delhi Congress Chief Anil Chaudhary has announced that the party will not be participating in the mayoral polls and has decided not to support either the AAP or the BJP in the elections for the mayor and deputy mayor’s posts.
