THAT THIS CHHATH ELECTION

Rekha Gupta's government is in overdrive on both banks of the Yamuna. The festival associated with Bihar has acquired a political life hundreds of kilometres away from its home, just so her party can make a point in the upcoming Assembly election, reports Anup Verma

- Anup Verma

HERE is a new undercurrent in the Yamuna this Chhath. The intensity of its ripples is not being dictated by the gatekeepers of the Hathni Kund barrage any more. Instead, the slow, meandering river has become the focus of excessive attention of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Delhi. From Chief Minister Rekha Gupta downwards—or, one can say, upwards as well, including the office of the Delhi lieutenant governor—at least one political member of the government is dispatched to the nondescript ghats of the Yamuna every day to supervise the preparations for the Chhath festival, which started on Saturday.

The flurry of activities in the river and its ghats—be they development of new ghats, landscaping, road surfacing, smart lighting, or cultural activities—have a political dimension to them which the city has not witnessed before. That the Chhath is about Bihar and Bihari women is not lost on the politician. That cultural resurgence is translatable into votes in distant lands is an innovation of the politician.

Innovation after hiatus

The capital has changed since 1998, when the BJP last governed it before registering a thumping win in the Assembly election earlier this year. It took the BJP 26 long years to understand the changing demographics of the city, which the dominant figures of the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Sheila Dikshit and Arvind Kejriwal, respectively, grasped much before the BJP could.

Over the years, Purvanchalis have consolidated as a geographical and cultural voting bloc in many constituencies of east Delhi, whose political currency is coveted by competing political interests. "In 2013, 2015, and 2020 assembly elections, this bloc voted for AAP. However, in the 2025 election, it has shifted towards the BJP, facilitating the defeat of many AAP candidates," says Neeraj Singh, a Purvanchali, who is associated with the BJP and now settled in Delhi.