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Jalandhar bypoll: Campaigning ends, stage set for four-cornered contest
The campaigning for the high-stakes May 10 Jalandhar Lok Sabha bypoll ended on Monday setting the stage for a four-cornered electoral battle.
The campaigning for the high-stakes May 10 Jalandhar Lok Sabha bypoll ended on Monday setting the stage for a four-cornered electoral battle.
Ending the 27-day-long campaign, the top leadership of all the political outfits went all out in a last-ditch effort to woo the voters in all the nine assembly segments of the Jalandhar parliamentary constituency, a key Dalit bastion.
There are a total of 16,21,800 voters, comprising 8,44,904 males and 7,76,855 females and 41 transgenders, in the constituency.
There are a total of 19 candidates, including four women, in the fray.
Polling will take place from 8 am to 6 pm on May 10, while the counting of votes will be held on May 13.
The byelection was necessitated after sitting Congress MP Santokh Chaudhary died due to a heart attack while taking part in the Punjab leg of the Bharat Jodo Yatra of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on January 14.
The AAP has fielded Sushil Kumar Rinku, while the Congress has reposed trust in the Chaudhary family, giving the ticket to Santokh’s wife Karamjit Kaur Chaudhary.
From the SAD-BSP, sitting Banga MLA Sukhwinder Kumar Sukhi is in the fray, while the BJP has chosen Inder Iqbal Singh Atwal, a Sikh-Dalit face, who switched to the saffron party after snapping ties with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD).
While the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) focused on door-to-door campaigning on the last day, the Congress once put up a united show with its top leadership walking together in a roadshow in Jalandhar city.
Senior Congress leaders, including former chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi, leader of opposition Partap Singh Bajwa, Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president Amarinder Singh Raja Warring and senior leader Navjot Singh Sidhu were present at the roadshow.
Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also held a roadshow led by BJP state president Ashwani Sharma. The saffron party had managed to build an impressive campaign for the bypoll with its top cabinet ministers and senior leadership remaining present throughout the canvassing sessions.
Led by Sukhbir Singh Badal, the Shiromani Akali Dal and its ally Bahujan Samaj Party also organised a roadshow with a focus on rural segments, including Shahkot, Nakodar and Kartarpur areas. In other parts of the constituency, it went for a door-to-door campaign.
The high-pitched campaigning focus remained on issues pertaining to the Dalit community. Dalits constitute 32% of the population in Punjab, the highest among all states but in Doaba, the Dalits account for 45% of the population.
Stakes high
For the ruling AAP, it seems to be a must-win battle, especially after the party’s defeat in the Sangrur Lok Sabha bypoll in June 2022, three months after it came to power with a thumping mandate of 92 MLAs in the state assembly. The bypoll will also be the test of AAP’s one-year performance and its populist promises made to the people of Punjab at the time of the 2022 assembly elections. In the 2022 polls, the Congress had won five out of nine segments in the Jalandhar parliamentary constituency, while the AAP bagged the remaining seats.
At the same time, Congress is looking to defend its bastion where it has remained undefeated since 1999. The unity display in the bypoll is seen as a warm-up for the national polls and is important for the Congress which has been riven by factional fighting in recent years. When the party was in power, infighting had created upheaval in its government, resulting in the replacement of the then chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh in September 2021, and a humiliating defeat in the state assembly election last year. For this bypoll, the party seems to have put its entire weight behind Karamjit Kaur Chaudhary.
Amidst all this, the party is going through a credibility crisis in the state, particularly after its defeat in the 2022 assembly elections. Many of its former cabinet ministers and MLAs are facing vigilance probes over corruption charges and allegedly amassing disproportionate assets during their tenure from 2017 to 2022.
Though the Congress continues to term it as ‘vendetta politics’, three of its leaders and former cabinet ministers -- Sunder Sham Arora, Bharat Bhushan Ashu and Sadhu Singh Dharamsot -- were arrested by the vigilance bureau in cases of allegedly amassing disproportionate assets.
For the SAD-BSP combine, it is surely a battle of revival and existence in Punjab’s present-day political scenario. The Akali Dal, which remained in power for a decade from 2007, presently has only three MLAs in the Vidhan Sabha.
The BJP also stares at the major challenge of contesting its maiden independent parliamentary election in Punjab after snapping its ties with the SAD.
In the 2022 state assembly elections, the BJP had contested 73 of the total 117 seats, but could only win two -- Pathankot and Mukerian -- with a vote share of just 6.6%.
