Aam Aadmi Party to contest all 36 Assembly seats in Mumbai 

Mumbai, Aug. 5 (IANS) The Maharashtra unit of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will contest all the 36 seats in Mumbai in the upcoming Assembly elections, a top party leader said here on Monday. 

Mumbai AAP President Preeti Sharma-Menon said that while the party workers have started working enthusiastically in the state capital, the cadres in other parts of Maharashtra are also galvanised and making all-out preparations for the Assembly elections scheduled later this year.

Slamming the ruling MahaYuti regime as a ‘Khoke Sarkar’, Sharma-Menon alleged that it has displayed zero political will for public welfare but is busy in wholesale corruption and looting the state exchequer.

“Not only have they committed a fraud on the Constitution but also on the people of Maharashtra with its series of failures to tackle major issues confronting the state,” Sharma-Menon said while speaking to the media.

She cited growing unemployment, high inflation, and the agrarian distress leading to suicides among the farmers, and how the erstwhile industrialised state no longer leads in terms of its GDP.

Sharma-Menon claimed that socially disadvantaged groups and marginalised sections of society are being subjected to increasing violence and discrimination under the Shiv Sena-BJP-NCP rule in Maharashtra.

“The government is not serious about the issue of Maratha reservations despite the long mass movement of (Shivba Sanghatana chief) Manoj Jarange-Patil and is attempting to divide the society on caste lines,” she claimed.

Additionally, organised criminal activities are going on with impunity under political patronage, Mumbai’s infrastructure is crumbling, housing remains a huge issue, slums are becoming unlivable, and the builder-contractor mafias have taken over the city, she added.

“The BJP is anti-Maharashtra and anti-Mumbai. It cannot tolerate the city’s pre-eminence as the country’s commercial capital and an engine of India’s economic growth. It is driving out projects from here to Gujarat to kill this city,” she alleged.

Against this backdrop, she said, APP under the leadership of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal would strive to change the scenario with its successful models of development implemented in Delhi and Punjab with a clean and new political culture, the AAP leader said.