Huge Protests By BJP, AAP Members Amid Delhi Mayor Election: 10 Points

1. Arvind Kejriwal’s party has fielded Shelly Oberoi for the top post in the civic body. Challenging her is the BJP’s Shalimar Bagh councillor Rekha Gupta. AAP’s back-up candidate is Ashu Thakur. The nominees for the post of deputy mayor are AAP’s Aaley Muhammad Iqbal and Jalaj Kumar and Kamal Bagri from the BJP.

2. The election comes amid a row over the appointment of BJP councillor Satya Sharma as the presiding officer for the election. The Lieutenant Governor appointed Mr Sharma instead of Mukesh Goyal, whom AAP had recommended.

3. AAP chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal accused the Lieutenant Governor, the Centre’s representative in Delhi, of trying to influence the election and intentionally picking members so that the civic body is “skewed” towards the BJP.

4. “It is the tradition that the senior most member of House is nominated as protem Speaker or presiding officer. But BJP is hell bent destroying all democratic traditions and Institutions,” tweeted AAP MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj.

5. Mukesh Goyal is the seniormost councilor in the new civic body. Satya Sharma is a former Mayor of the erstwhile East Delhi Municipal Corporation. AAP has now appointed Mr Goyal, its Adarsh Nagar councillor, as the Leader of the House.

6. AAP, which achieved a landslide victory in two consecutive assembly polls in Delhi, won the civic body this time, ending the BJP’s 15-year rule. The party, which based its campaign on the garbage issue, bagged 134 wards.

7. The BJP, a distant second with 104 wards, has maintained that the Mayor’s post is an open race. It fielded its candidate after initially suggesting that it would not contest the post.

8. The Congress, which won only nine seats in the 250-member civic body, has said it will not participate in the election as its Delhi unit has unanimously decided not to support AAP or the BJP.

9. This was the first civic elections in Delhi after the redrawing of the wards – an exercise AAP claimed was a BJP ploy to ward off defeat. Though the BJP had not won any election in Delhi in more than two decades, it managed to stay in power in the civic body for 15 years.

10. The post of mayor in Delhi involves five single-year terms on a rotation basis, with the first year being reserved for women, the second for the open category, third for the reserved category, and the remaining two also being in the open category.

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