BJP to contest under ex-IPS officer Kiran Bedi's leadership

In a clear hint that it has finally found a face which it was desperately looking for so far to take on Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi Assembly elections, the BJP on Thursday not only inducted former IPS officer and prominent former Team Anna member Kiran Bedi into the party but also announced that she would contest the polls. Bedi, who so far had kept herself away from party and electoral politics, would be leading the BJP's campaign in Delhi. Former Delhi BJP president Vijay Goel welcomed her entry in the BJP and said, "The workers are excited about it. We will win by two-thirds majority in Delhi under her leadership." "Bedi will be BJP's chief ministerial candidate if the party gets majority and she wins the Assembly election," a senior leader told IBNLiveIn a last-ditch effort by the BJP to strengthen its position in the Delhi Assembly elections, Bedi's announcement comes just a day after Arvind Kejriwal launched a frontal attack on Delhi BJP president Satish Upadhyay accusing him of owning companies which are responsible for installing and replacing fast-running electricity meters in Delhi. With Bedi in its ranks the BJP has fine-tuned its strategy in the eleventh hour. So far, the BJP had kept away from projecting any face for the Delhi Assembly elections even though it had contested the 2013 Assembly elections under the leadership of then state president Harsh Vardhan. The BJP emerged as the single largest party bagging 31 seats in the 70-member House but chose not to stake claim to form government, passing on the opportunity to AAP. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Vardhan contested from Chandni Chowk, won and became a Union Minister. He was replaced as the BJP state chief by Satish Upadhyay. Surprisingly, neither he nor any other leader has been projected as the party's chief ministerial candidate for the February 7 elections. The BJP leaders said the move was in line with its new strategy of not to project any face for the Assembly elections, as it did in the Maharashtra, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand elections. The party contested all these elections riding the Modi wave. However, a last-minute tweaking seems to have been done for the Delhi elections and the reason apparently is AAP and particularly Kejriwal's aggressive style of campaigning. With Kejriwal already having lost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi once in the last Lok Sabha elections from Varanasi, AAP has purposely tried its best to avoid making the Delhi elections a Modi vs Kejriwal contest. Instead, to take an edge, AAP has tried to make this contest between Kejriwal and senior BJP state leader Jagdish Mukhi, who served a legal notice to Kejriwal for "misusing" his photo by putting it up on posters. The BJP wishes to match AAP's strategy by projecting Bedi as its face and back it up with rallies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP is yet to reveal whether it will field Bedi against Kejriwal from New Delhi constituency. But the AAP has already started attacking Bedi, who as late as last week had said she would never involve herself in party politics. In fact, she had parted ways with Kejriwal over formation of AAP. Senior AAP leaders like Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Singh have hit out at her on this count. Bedi will have to do some explanation to convince the voters in this regard in order to strengthen her prospects in her debut in politics.