CHANDIGARH: The absence of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in the by-elections for four assembly seats in Punjab seems to have benefitted the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that won three of the four assembly seats. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fielded former Akali leaders on three of the four seats for which the by-elections were held. Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president Amarinder Singh Raja Warring said, “The party lost largely due to the absence of Shiromani Akali Dal as the Akali voters opted for AAP. We have been able to retain our voter base in Gidderbaha and Dera Baba Nanak. As earlier, it has always been a fight between the Congress and the Akalis.”Leader of opposition and senior Congress leader Partap Singh Bajwa said the Congress has retained its voter base and even slightly improved it, but a majority of Akali voters voted for AAP. Sources said that now these by-election results would have implications not only for Raja Warring, whose wife Amrita Warring lost in Gidderbaha, but also for senior leader and Gurdaspur MP Sukhjinder Randhawa, whose wife Jatinder Kaur lost in Dera Baba Nanak. With mounting criticism against Warring, some party leaders are of the view that after Warring was elected as MP from Ludhiana, he should hand over the state leadership to someone else. After the AAP appointed a Hindu face, Aman Arora, as its state unit chief many leaders in the Congress feel that priority is given to Hindu, SC and OBC leadership. Now the party has 16 MLAs in the assembly; earlier it had 18. The saffron party not only lost the security deposit in three out of the four assembly constituencies but also performed worse than the Lok Sabha polls. The party managed to get only a 10.6 per cent vote share in these by-polls. In the Dera Baba Nanak assembly segment, the party managed to retain the vote share and in the others, it fell as compared to Lok Sabha polls. In the parliamentary elections segment, it got 18.56 per cent vote share but could not win even single seat. It was 9.63 per cent in 2019. BJP candidates came third in all four assembly seats, only Kewal Singh Dhillon could save his security deposit in Barnala by securing 17,958 votes. While Manpreet Badal got 12,227 votes in Gidderbaha, Karan Singh Kahlon secured 6,505 votes in Dera Baba Nanak and Sohan Singh Thandal managed to get 8,692 votes in Chabbewal. Union Minister Ravneet Bittu blamed the lack of active involvement of the Punjab BJP president Sunil Jakhar for the party’s loss. “I do not want to go into the issue which will be sorted out internally by the party but had Sunil Jakhar taken interest in these by-elections, the results would have been very different.” Punjab BJP President Sunil Jakhar has already offered to resign amid the growing differences between the original BJP leaders in the state and those who came on board from other parties. Bittu further said that he was glad that Amrita Warring, wife of Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Raja Warring, lost because it was important to show that arrogance always has a fall. Bittu and Raja Warring had contested against each other in Ludhiana during the Lok Sabha elections, where Bittu had lost.
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