Delhi polls: At Laxmi Nagar, AAP, BJP are even

NEW DELHI: Laxmi Nagar was swept by the Aam Aadmi Party wave in 2013, with Vinod Kumar Binny stealing a comfortable win over former Congress MLA Ashok Kumar Walia. This year, the constituency is no cakewalk for any of the candidates.

AAP's winning candidate Binny had a fallout with his party in January 2014 and was finally expelled a few months later. This time, he is contesting the assembly election as a BJP candidate from neighbouring Patparganj. He has been replaced by Nitin Tyagi, an AAP volunteer who worked with Manish Sisodia in the 2013 campaign.

Tyagi is being given competition by BJP's BB Tyagi. Since both belong to the same community, sources say votes are getting split. AAP, though, hopes to win the support of the Muslims in the area and residents of the JJ clusters. To add to the confusion, Walia, an extremely popular politician, fell ill earlier this month and has barely been able to campaign.

"Because of Waliaji's ill-health, many Congress supporters may shift to AAP. While both AAP and BJP have been campaigning very actively, we have barely seen anything from Congress. However, there is also support for BJP in the traders' community and in some part of the Brahmin community. It looks like a close contest," said Padma Singh, a resident.

The area faces broken or absent roads, poor sanitary conditions and water issues. There is also a lot of unauthorized construction, leading to a massive stress on infrastructure.