As the race for elections heats up in Delhi, the prime candidates vying for the chief minister's position will be Aam Aadmi Party's Arving Kejriwal, Congress's Kiran Walia, and possibly Kiran Bedi from the Bharatiya Janata Party.
After BJP announced the induction of Bedi into the party, reports have indicated that the former IPS officer is likely to lead the campaign in Delhi, which goes to poll on February 7. While it is likely that BJP will announce its chief ministerial candidate by Monday, Congress announced Walia as their candidate on Friday.
Walia was among four candidates named by the Congress for in its fourth and final list on Friday. Earlier, Kejriwal had defeated thrice-appointed CM Sheila Dikshit from this assembly segment in the 2013 assembly polls by nearly 26,000 votes, while Walia, a three-time minister in Dikshit's cabinet, was defeated by AAP leader Somnath Bharti in Malviya Nagar.
With this, the party has declared all its candidates for 70-member assembly. The first to do so was the AAP. The BJP has not named any candidate so far.
Meanwhile BJP is expected to have a Parliamentary Board meeting on Monday to make a decision on their CM candidate. Though Bedi looks a likely candidate for the position after she was warmly invited into the saffron party's folds, she has maintained that "full statehood" is not part of her agenda at the moment and she was more concerned with "women's safety" in the city. The party has as yet not announced which constituency she will be contesting from.