NEW DELHI: Refusing to concede that the debacle in the Rajouri Garden assembly bye-election and the Aam Aadmi Party’s dismal performance in Punjab and Goa indicated people’s loss of faith in Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia insisted that the party would leverage its two years of administration to win the municipal polls slated for April 23. However, given AAP’s doubts about the reliability of the voting machines, the deputy chief minister said he was open to the civic polls being postponed to ensure free and fair polls.Sisodia maintained that Kejriwal was not the sole factor for AAP, though he was its face and people trusted him. “In 2013, when AAP contested for the first time it was 100% the Kejriwal factor. In 2015, it was Kejriwal plus 49 days, and now it is Kejriwal plus two years of government,” Sisodia told TOI on Saturday.Explaining why AAP was not attacking the central government or the Prime Minister, as it is wont to, in the current campaigning, Sisodia said, “When it has to do with Delhi, we raise our difficulties with the Centre. But in the case of municipal bodies, we cannot rake up any issue because neither the Centre nor the state has stopped the corporations from doing their work. Our campaign is thus localised.”Sisodia was also complacent about the possible impact on the poll results of the publicising of the Shunglu Committee report on the government’s administrative irregularities. “The Shunglu Committee does not accuse us of corruption of even one rupee. It only points out our procedural shortcomings,” maintained Sisodia, and added, “People would have taken note of it if this was a one-off allegation. But BJP rakes up something every day and people understand the politics behind these allegations.”The deputy CM rebutted the charges that the Bawana MAL Ved Prakash resigned recently due to lack of internal democracy in AAP and the inaccessibility of its top leaders, choosing instead to characterise it as the opposition parties’ strategy to paint AAP as a fractious entity. “BJP and Congress raise these issues because they don’t have real issues against us,” Sisodia asserted.Maintaining that AAP had lost the Rajouri Garden bye-election because it had angered the people by asking sitting MLA Jarnail Singh to contest in Punjab and not because of any failure of the AAP government, Sisodia was optimistic that in the civic elections, people would endorse the work that AAP had done in two years against BJP’s 10-year performance in the corporations. “Besides, BJP has also failed to deliver on PM Narendra Modi’s flagship Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan in the last three years,” charged Sisodia.On who the party saw as its main opponent, Sisodia named “the mafia” as being behind the corruption that it was fighting. “Since both BJP and Congress give protection to this mafia, they are opponents in equal measure,” Sisodia declared.As for the party’s cynicism about the electronic voting machine, the AAP leader pointed out, “We are regularly asked why we never had doubts when AAP won 67 seats in Delhi. Yes, we did not raise questions then, even when BJP won 282 seats in the Lok Sabha or when it won in Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. We are asking questions now as certain proof of hacking has emerged.”He said AAP had requested the Election Commission to at least use voter verifiable paper audit trial (VVPAT) machines. “If EC has to postpone elections by a week or two weeks to get this done, it is okay,” Sisodia said.