The Aam Aadmi Party on Saturday announced that they will be supporting the Opposition’s presidential candidate Yashwant Sinha in the upcoming Presidential elections in the country.
“AAP will support Opposition’s Presidential candidate Yashwant Sinha. We respect Droupadi Murmu but we will vote for Yashwant Sinha,” AAP MP Sanjay Singh said.
The voting for the next President of India will start on July 18 while its counting will take place on July 21.
The decision to back Sinha came after a meeting of the Political Affairs Committee held in the residence of the party’s national convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
The decision was taken by the AAP’s highest decision-making body comprising all of its 11 members – Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, Sanjay Singh, Gopal Rai, Atishi, ND Gupta, Durgesh Pathak, Pankaj Gupta, Raghav Chadha, Imran Hussain, and Rakhi Birla.
Talking about the BJP-led NDA’s candidate Droupadi Murmu, Singh further said, “We respect Droupadi Murmu, but in the elections, we will support Yashwant Sinha. As decided by Arvind Kejriwal and Political Affairs Committee (PAC), all the party MLAs and MPs will be voting for Sinha.”
“We had said it earlier as well, that we will take a call on whom to support only after the names of the candidates were revealed, and hence, we have announced it today,” he reiterated.
AAP has 62 MLAs in the national capital and three Rajya Sabha MPs are from here only. They have 92 MLAs and seven Rajya Sabha MPs in Punjab, while Goa has two MLAs. Their votes matter as they have a total of 156 MLAs and 10 MPs, and as per the Presidential Election calculations, they hold a value of 2 per cent in the Prez polls.
In a conversation with ANI, Singh said, “Our support will be important. We are the fourth biggest political party after the Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, and Communist Party, which has succeeded in forming government in two states of the country.”
“If the Aam Aadmi Party has decided to support the opposition candidate, then it is a good decision and I think it will be evaluated when the results come,” he added while asserting that AAP has its footprint in every region of the country.
When asked that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar did not pick the call when Sinha approached him seeking support, AAP MP Sanjay Singh said, “In the Presidential polls, every MLA and MP is free to cast their vote as no whip can be issued during these elections.”
“If people want to vote for Yashwant Sinha, there is no compulsion for whip from any party. If the MPs and MLAs vote for Sinha because they hail from Bihar and Jharkhand, it will be a good thing,” he added.