The Gujarat Assembly elections will be held in two phases. The first
phase on December 1 and second on December 5. Results of the Gujarat and
Himachal Pradesh Assembly elections will be announced on the same day –
December 8. Minutes after the Election Commission’s announcement of the poll
schedule, Delhi chief minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal
declared that his party will win Gujarat.

“I am your brother, part of your family. Give me once chance and I’ll
give you free electricity, build schools and hospitals…and take you to Ayodhya’s
Ram Temple,” Kejriwal said in a minute-long video message. The Aam Aadmi Party
further made several tall claims about their chances.

“We are winning 90-95 seats (of the 182 seats in Gujarat) now. And if
this pace continues, we will win 140 to 150 seats,” said Saurabh Bharadwaj,
chief spokesperson of AAP while speaking to NDTV.

Meanwhile, Manoj Sorathiya, AAP’s general secretary in Gujarat, said the
party will announce its chief ministerial candidate for the upcoming elections
tomorrow (November 4) through public opinion.

The selection of the chief ministerial candidate through public opinion
was a strategy that worked for AAP in Punjab. “The atmosphere in Gujarat is
signalling that AAP is going to form the government. We want to ask the people
of Gujarat who should be the next chief minister, and for that, we are issuing
a contact number and email ID,” Kejriwal had said in Gujarat last week.

While AAP has been claiming it has a serious chance in the upcoming
elections, the traditional parties, BJP and Congress have refused to look at
AAP with any seriousness. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power in
Gujarat for 25 years and will be looking to score a sixth term. The Congress,
while out of power in the state since 1995, made major inroads in the 2017
elections when it won 77 seats against BJP’s 99.