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Lone SAD winner, Harsimrat doubles victory margin
Harsimrat Kaur Badal of the Shiromani Akali Dal has won the Bathinda Lok Sabha seat four times consecutively.
Harsimrat Kaur Badal will be Shiromani Akali Dal’s lone voice in the Parliament. Her victory is a record, winning a seat four times consecutively in Bathinda where the Badal family has invested heavily over the past few decades in developing the city on a par with other major cities of the state.
With party president Sukhbir Singh Badal, the outgoing MP from Ferozepur seat, opting out of the contest and focusing on the state-wide campaigning for all 13 candidates, a lot was riding on Harsimrat as the Badal family’s only hope.
Sukhbir made all attempts to pull up party’s stocks, running a hectic campaign across the state for nearly four months. Bathinda remained under his close watch. Bikram Singh Majithia, former minister from the party, also took time to campaign in the constituency.
To counter them, Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann also held half-a-dozen roadshows and rallies in the constituency, focusing his campaign on targeting Badals, but without a success. He sang kikli, hitting at the Badals, but the local electorate ignored that.
Harsimrat bagged 3,76,558 votes to defeat her nearest rival Gurmeet Singh Khudian of the Aam Aadmi party (AAP) by 49,565 votes, marking an improvement in the margin that was 21,772 in 2019 and 19,395 in 2014.
The results this time also show that the SAD won with a considerable margin in Lambi, the home constituency of former CM and party patriarch Parkash Singh Badal that he lost to Khudian in assembly polls of 2022.
Party insiders say despite the fact that the party had no MLA on any of the nine assembly constituencies falling within the Parliament segment, Harsimrat managed to bring out party’s workers and leaders to campaign and garner votes for her.
Going by party’s stand, she effectively talked about the “panthic” agenda, seeking more rights for Punjab and reminding the electorate of the Operation Bluestar and anti-Sikh riots of 1984. She also asked her supporters not to celebrate her victory.
In a message on microblogging site X, she said that in June month (in 1984), then Congress government had hurt Sikh sentiments by launching an army attack on Darbar Sahib, Amritsar. “Keeping that in mind, I appeal to the electorate of Bathinda not to celebrate my victory,” she mentioned.
