Aam Aadmi Party to field strong candidate against Harsh Vardhan

NEW DELHI: Aam Aadmi Party is keen to field a strong candidate against BJP's Chief Ministerial candidate Harsh Vardhan from Krishna Nagar constituency in forthcoming Delhi assembly polls.

AAP was earlier planning to field its star campaigner Kumar Vishwas against Vardhan. The party, however, claimed that it never declared Vishwas as party candidate from Krishna Nagar and was still searching for a strong contestant.

"We had discussions on his name, but we felt his services would be required for all assembly constituencies as he is our star campaigner, so we have dropped the idea to field him," a senior party leader said.

He said, Vishwas had never expressed his desire to contest polls and "it would be not in anybody's favour to bind him in one constituency, when he is in demand everywhere."

The Arvind Kejriwal-led party, which is making its electoral debut in the December 4 Delhi Assembly elections, had finalised its candidate -- a civil engineer, Sushil Chauhan -- from Krishna Nagar Assembly constituency but he withdrew citing "family reasons".

The party is in a dilemma in deciding a prominent political face who can take on the senior BJP leader and four-time MLA, whom Kejriwal had termed as "Manmohan Singh of BJP" after his name was cleared by BJP's parliamentary committee as the Chief Ministerial candidate.

Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, Prashant Bhushan, Sanjay Singh, Gopal Rai, Yogendra Yadav and Kumar Vishwas are some of the known faces of the party, the AAP leader said.

Of these, Sisodia, Rai and Kejriwal are candidates from Patparganj, Babarpur and New Delhi Assembly constituencies.

So, the party is left with Vishwas, Singh, Bhushan and Yadav, but they are not contesting election and busy in supervising election-related work, he added.

Vardhan had been winning this seat since 1993. In 2008 elections, he managed to win with a slender margin of around 3,204 votes after the contours of his constituency changed due to delimitation.