NEW DELHI: BJP contested the Delhi election without a local face, but his giant-killing feat put one man in the limelight by the time vote counting was done and results were announced on Saturday – Parvesh Verma, the man who had beaten Arvind Kejriwal.
Cast into the assembly battle, facing Kejriwal – who had never lost a Delhi election since his 2013 debut as anti-corruption crusader – wasn’t the former West Delhi MP’s only challenge.
Delhi Election Results 2025
He was also moving away from his comfort zone and taking on the AAP chief on his home turf of New Delhi, which Kejriwal had won three times.
Scion of one of Delhi’s most influential political families, this will be Parvesh’s second stint in the Delhi assembly, the dream ending far removed from the disappointment of last year when he was denied an LS poll ticket from West Delhi, where he had two terms as MP.
Assembly elections were up next and the obvious thing to do would have been to contest from a seat like Mehrauli, which is dominated by Jat voters and where Parvesh had won his first assembly poll, or to one in outer Delhi, where his father and former CM Sahib Singh Verma’s political legacy would have helped him.
Parvesh, however, had other plans. He approached the party for an opportunity to contest from New Delhi. BJP, which didn’t have abundance of options against Kejriwal, agreed – the thought was that they needed a strong candidate who could not just challenge Kejriwal but bind him down to the seat during the campaign. In the feisty Kirori Mal College alum, they had one.
But even after his candidature was declared, there were many in the party circles who didn’t think he had a serious chance of pulling off an upset – Kejriwal was on strong wicket and the seat does not have any significant Jat base that Parvesh could build on.
But as the campaign wore on, Parvesh gained momentum. He was in the news almost as soon as BJP unveiled him as its New Delhi face, after AAP alleged he was distributing money to women at his home. Conventional wisdom would have been to defend, but Parvesh came out swinging. He didn’t deny it, but claimed he was doing so through his NGO to “help women”. Elections had not been announced then, so the model code was not yet in place. “At least I am not distributing alcohol,” Parvesh said, hitting back at AAP.
After the elections were announced, the 48-year-old Parvesh stuck to the aggressive stance. “His political style is that offence is the best form of defence,” a party functionary said. He aced the BJP strategy to keep Kejriwal – AAP’s main campaigner – occupied. On most days, Parvesh held press briefings either accusing Kejriwal of electoral malpractices or making announcements that were central to the constituency.
Yet, there was a difference. The MLA candidate was different from the MP who had come out as a strident Hindutva voice in his second term, with several of his statements running into controversy, especially during the anti-CAA protests at Shaheen Bagh. He had also drawn up a list of mosques and graveyards that allegedly exist illegally on govt land across his constituency.
But in step with the party’s strategy to not polarise the Delhi campaign and keep up the attack on Kejriwal instead, Parvesh made no such comment. Instead, he focused on taking up issues like cleaning up Yamuna, which Kejriwal had escalated into a major poll issue, Delhi’s deteriorating roads and dirty water in slums. He also put a cutout of Kejriwal in the Yamuna, stating the AAP govt had failed to clean the river.
On Saturday, the victory over Kejriwal made him the most prominent face of BJP’s crushing win over AAP and greatly enhanced its stature in Delhi BJP, which is going through a leadership transition. As a man who eschews TV debates, he isn’t one who is naturally drawn to limelight. “Many people call me to TV debates, but I don’t go because I believe using the same time to meet people or attend a function in my constituency is better political strategy. I learnt it from my father,” Parvesh, who went to school at DPS RK Puram and has an MBA degree, once told this correspondent.
Considered close to home minister Amit Shah, Parvesh has volunteered with RSS. He is married to Swati Singh, daughter of former Union minister and BJP veteran from MP, Vikram Verma.
Asked if he was a CM candidate, he told TOI on Saturday, “It is for party to decide. My duty as a soldier of PM Modi was to give him this constituency.”
Wherever the path leads, Verma Jr will have an opportunity to make a legacy of his own.