Sulking descendant of Shastri holds key to Dwarka

Dwarka, a subcity of Delhi near the capital's airport, was built to address the lack of affordable housing in the city. Today, the assembly constituency is the bastion of a descendant of former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, Adarsh Shastri. But after he was unceremoniously replaced by the AAP, a sulking Shastri may hold the key as to who would win Dwarka.

Dwarka has 218,862 voters and is a part of West Delhi Lok Sabha constituency along with nine other Assembly segments which include Madipur, Rajouri Garden, Hari Nagar, Tilak Nagar, Janakpuri, Vikaspuri, Uttam Nagar, Matiala and Najafgarh.

This assembly constituency came into existence in 2008 after the delimitation process. Areas like Nasirpur village, Dashrath Puri, Dabri village, Sagar Pur and various sectors of Dwarka come under this assembly constituency.

Though it came into existence to solve the problem of affordable housing, over the years the place has become home to a rising upper middle class. The aspirations of the constituency are also accordingly different. Here, prime electoral concerns are traffic woes, lack of police patrol and a need for better public commute.

In 2015, Aam Aadmi Party's Shastri won from this seat. A former Sales Head at Apple India, Shastri switched to politics to "change" the status quo. Shastri led an intellectual think tank of AAP, Delhi Dialogue, along with Ashish Khetan, Meera Sanyal and Preeti Sharma Menon.

In 2015, he defeated BJP's Pradyumn Rajpoot by a huge margin of 39,366 votes. But after being assured of a ticket till a week back, the Shastri descendant was shown the door, leaving him sulking. AAP has given ticket to Vinay Kumar Mishra, whom the Shastri camp does not like.

( With inputs from IANS )