As Aam Aadmi Party beat anti-incumbency and a fiery opposition campaign to achieve a hat-trick in the capital, the mood in Arvind Kejriwal's Delhi is jubilant. The party maintained 50 per cent of the vote share as per early trends with the Bharatiya Janata Party finishing at a distant second.
AAP's star candidates Manish Sisodia, Atishi and Amanatullah Khan (who contested from Okhla constituency which includes Shaheen Bagh) managed to defeat their BJP and Congress counterparts, leading the party to a spectacular sweep. While an exultant Kejriwal was photographed celebrating with his wife (who incidentally happened to be born on February 11) and cutting her birthday cake, AAP's social media team skipped no beat before taking to Twitter to share their joy.
And it seems they found the perfect meme to say it with - a gig of Bollywood's Shah Rukh Khan as Kabir Khan in Chak De. The scene is after Khan leads the Indian Girls Hockey team to its first international victory under his coaching. A proud and exhilarated Khan looks at the Indian flag being unfurled ahead of the Australian flag thanks to all their hard work and perseverance.
The meme, captioned "emotions right now...", probably reflects the relief and joy felt by all supporters of AAP and Kejriwal himself who had himself been mired in a particularly biting election campaign. The run up to the polls saw the city go through several tense situations including protests across the city against the newly drafted citizenship laws, shootings at civilians, communal inflammation and calls for violence. Kejriwal himself was called "terrorist" and his party demonised for standing in support of protesters at Shaheen Bagh.
While critics slammed Kejriwal's promises to provide subsidies on electricity, water and bus transport for women, the AAP maintained its populist party line. Thus the victory, albeit predicted, was hard earned and social media could well share the exultance that Kabir Khan probably felt after his team won the World Cup.
Nevertheless, while the tweet got thousands of likes and retweets, netizens were compelled to wonder whether AAP's Twitter admin is an SRK fan. Apart from jokes, many also praised AAP and its social media team for their work which contributed to the victory. Congratulations especially to the social media team. Your work has been amazing! Incidentally, this is not the first time that AAP has shared an SRK meme to reach out to its supporters on 'Propose Day'.
