BJP’s Sarabjit Kaur is Chandigarh mayor, Aam Aadmi Party cries foul - Hindustan Times
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BJP’s Sarabjit Kaur is Chandigarh mayor, Aam Aadmi Party cries foul

Jan 09, 2022 02:49 AM IST

Aam Aadmi Party loses on counts of an invalid vote, cross-voting and bad luck as the BJP pips it for posts of senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor, too

Blurb:

Chandigarh mayor Sarbjit Kaur (seated) with city BJP president Arun Sood and others after the mayoral elections on Saturday. She defeated Anju Katyal of the Aam Aadmi Party by one vote. (Ravi Kumar/HT)
Chandigarh mayor Sarbjit Kaur (seated) with city BJP president Arun Sood and others after the mayoral elections on Saturday. She defeated Anju Katyal of the Aam Aadmi Party by one vote. (Ravi Kumar/HT)

Chandigarh Amid unruly scenes and protests by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), BJP’s first-time councillor Sarabjit Kaur Dhillon took over as the new Chandigarh mayor on Saturday. This was the seventh successive win for the BJP in the mayoral election.

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An invalid vote, one cross-vote and draw of lots decided the fate of the mayoral elections as the BJP clean-swept all the three posts – mayor, senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor.

Sarabjit defeated her rival Anju Katyal of the AAP by one vote. She received 14 votes, while Katyal managed 13 and one vote was declared invalid.

At the start of the election proceedings, both the BJP and the AAP had 14 votes each in the House, and seven councillors of the Congress and the lone member of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in the 36-member Chandigarh Municipal Corporation abstained from the voting.

In the senior deputy mayor elections, the BJP candidate Dalip Sharma pipped the AAP candidate Prem Lata by two votes, after one of the AAP councillors voted for him instead of AAP. Sharma was polled 15 votes, while Lata got 13.

For the deputy mayor’s post, after BJP’s Anup Gupta and AAP’s Ram Chander Yadav were tied at 14 votes each, a draw of lot was conducted, which went in favour of Gupta.

The results of the Chandigarh civic body polls, which were declared on December 27 last year, threw up a hung House, with the AAP winning 14 of the 35 wards in its first civic body elections. The BJP won 12 seats, Congress eight while the SAD got one.

The BJP’s vote count in the House increased to 13 after Congress’s Harpreet Kaur Babla, the wife of party’s former Chandigarh vice-president Devinder Babla, along with him, joined the BJP on January 2. One more vote for the BJP came from city Lok Sabha MP Kirron Kher.

AAP CREATES RUCKUS OVER INVALID VOTE

During the mayor election, one AAP vote was declared invalid, which tipped the election in favour of BJP’s Sarabjit.

The presiding officer Maheshinder Singh Sidhu, a BJP councillor himself, ruled that an “identification mark” in the form of a “tick” found on the backside of one of the ballot papers, which makes it invalid. Meanwhile, AAP’s polling agent objected to a BJP vote, alleging that it was torn at the bottom, which he claimed was also mark of identification.

But Sidhu declared that rules don’t term a torn ballot as a mark of identification.

Soon after the mayor’s result was declared, AAP councillors created ruckus in the House and resorted to sloganeering.

They rushed to the mayor’s chair on the dais and tried to stop Sarabjit from occupying the mayor’s chair. They also tried to stop MC commissioner, deputy commissioner and other officials from leaving their seats.

With BJP councillors, too, rushing to the dais, there was a lot of jostling and pushing between the councillors of the two parties. BJP councillors led by Kanwarjit Singh Rana surrounded mayor’s chair to stop rival councillors to reach her as she addressed the House. Soon afterwards, marshals (police) were called in who removed the AAP councillors off the dais.

But as the situation was calming down, things again precipitated as Chandigarh AAP president Prem Garg, who is not a councillor, entered the well of the House from the visitor’s gallery. One of the BJP councillors got hold of him before the marshals escorted him out of the House.

Later deputy commissioner Vinay Pratap Singh read out the law, rules and regulations, and eventually AAP councillors sat back on their seats. This was followed by the elections of the senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor.

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