Punjab’s ruling Congress maintained its winning streak from assembly elections by securing an emphatic win in the Gurdaspur Lok Sabha seat yesterday.
Congress candidate Sunil Jakhar won by a margin of over 193,000 votes, officials said. He polled over 499,000 votes, compared to 306,000 votes polled by Swaran Salaria of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) got only around 24,000 votes.
Jakhar, who was in the lead from the time the vote count began in the morning, extended the margin over his BJP rival after each of the 14 rounds of counting.
Congress leaders and workers started celebrating the impending victory by bursting firecrackers and distributing sweets in Gurdaspur, Chandigarh and other places even before the final result was declared.
“We won the election because of the positive policies of the Congress. People have faith in the party,” Jakhar, who was termed an ‘outsider’ in the constituency by his opponents, told reporters.
Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh hailed the “unprecedented” Congress victory “as a total rejection of the anti-people policies of the BJP and its ally, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)”.
“The massive win for Congress candidate shows the people’s complete denunciation of the corrupt and immoral BJP and SAD,” Singh said, adding that it also underlined the political annihilation of the AAP in the state.
“The over 1.93 lakh margin of victory has not only more than compensated for the 1.36 lakh vote defeat of Congress candidate Pratap Singh Bajwa against BJP’s Vinod Khanna in 2014 but has surpassed even the 1.51 lakh lead by which Sukhbans Kaur Bhinder (Congress) had won in 1980,” Singh said.
The seat was earlier held by the BJP, which had won it in 2014. The seat fell vacant in April following the death of veteran actor Vinod Khanna, a four-time MP from the seat.
AAP candidate retired Maj Gen Suresh Kumar Khajuria lost his security deposit.
Khajuria left the counting centre alleging that the voting was rigged by the Congress, which came to power in the state after sweeping the assembly elections.
The counting was conducted in centres in Gurdaspur and Pathankot towns. There were 11 candidates in the fray for the October 11 election. Nearly 56% of the 1.52mn registered voters exercised their franchise.
The voter turnout was much lower than the over 70% polling in 2014.
The victory of the Congress has put another spanner in the BJP bandwagon’s wheel.
Analysts said the Congress, which achieved an emphatic win in the February assembly elections and returned to power after a gap of 10 years, has again shown that it can counter the BJP’s political offensive.
Jakhar, a soft-spoken and suave politician who is the son of former Lok Sabha speaker Balram Jakhar, had to rely heavily on Congress legislators, leadership and workers in Gurdaspur and Pathankot districts to pull off the win.
The BJP, on the other hand, chose Mumbai-based millionaire businessman Salaria as its candidate, ignoring the claim of Khanna’s widow Kavita, who worked in the constituency during her husband’s absence.
Salaria, who has a controversial past, could not woo the voters even in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi or with his claim to being a “local” in Gurdaspur.
Sunil Jakhar, Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu and other Congress leaders celebrate after the party’s victory in Gurdaspur yesterday.
