The debutant Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) emerged as the leading outfit in the Chandigarh municipal corporation (MC) elections on Monday, winning 14 of the total 35 seats -- a surprise performance the party hailed as a major boost ahead of next year’s Punjab assembly elections -- but fell short of five seats required for a simple majority, throwing up a hung House.
The incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), meanwhile, was reduced to 12 councillors while the Congress won eight seats and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) managed one. The AAP will need 19 councillors to install a mayor, while the BJP, which has the advantage of one vote of sitting MP Kirron Kher in the House, will need 18 councillors to do so.
The BJP had 20 out of 26 councillors in In the outgoing House. The Congress had five and the Shiromani Akali Dal one. The number of wards was increased to 35 this time after delimitation and the merger of rural areas in the council.
“This is merely a trailer, the Punjab elections are yet to come. These results will be even more favourable in the 2022 Punjab elections,” AAP leader Raghav Chadha told TV channel.
To be sure, electoral trends in Chandigarh have not historically been a good barometer of popular mood in Punjab, a more diverse state with large swathes of rural areas. In 2016, for example, the BJP won 20 of the 26 seats in the Chandigarh municipal polls (the number increased to 35 after delimitation in 2020) but could only manage three of the 117 assembly seats in the state the next year. It’s erstwhile alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal was roundly defeated by the Congress, which own 77 seats.
{{/usCountry}}To be sure, electoral trends in Chandigarh have not historically been a good barometer of popular mood in Punjab, a more diverse state with large swathes of rural areas. In 2016, for example, the BJP won 20 of the 26 seats in the Chandigarh municipal polls (the number increased to 35 after delimitation in 2020) but could only manage three of the 117 assembly seats in the state the next year. It’s erstwhile alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal was roundly defeated by the Congress, which own 77 seats.
{{/usCountry}}The results were a major jolt for the BJP as seven of its sitting councillors, including incumbent mayor Ravi Kant Sharma and two former mayors Davesh Moudgil and Rajesh Kalia, lost. Sharma was defeated by the AAP’s Daman Preet Singh by 828 votes, while Moudgil was trumped by Jasbir Singh of the AAP by 939 votes. Kalia could secure only 3,139 votes and came third after Jatinder Kumar of Congress (4,384 votes), and the seat was won by Kuldeep Kumar, who secured 5,824 votes.
The four other councillors who lost are Shakti Devshali, Sunita Dhawan, Heera Negi and Bharat Kumar.
Among the Congress bigwigs, party’s chief spokesperson and former councillor HS Lucky and former mayor Kamlesh lost the election; as did two sitting councillors, Satish Kumar Kainth, a former deputy mayor, and Ravinder Kaur Gujral.
Local Congress chief Subhash Chawala’s son, Sumit Chawla stood third from Ward number 14 with only 2,532 votes. Here, BJP candidate Kuljeet Singh Sandhu won by a margin of 255 votes against the AAP’s Kuldeep Singh. The lone upset for the AAP was that election campaign committee head, Chander Mukhi Sharma, lost by 285 votes to former National Student Union of India leader Sachin Galav.
The closest contest was between Gurpreet Singh of Congress, who defeated Bhupinder Sharma of the BJP by nine votes. Suman Devi of the AAP pipped Savita Gupta of BJP by 12, and sitting BJP councillor Maheshinder Singh Sidhu won by a narrow margin of 11 votes against Harmohinder Singh Lucky.
Riding on a series of promises and freebies, the AAP ran a boisterous campaign in the elections. Though Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and MP Bhagwant Mann put in brief appearances, the party roped in several other senior leaders from Delhi, including nine MLAs, who oversaw the overall campaign. The party also cashed in on farmers’ protests, rising prices, and alleged poor management by the state government during the Covid-19 outbreak.