Chandigarh: In a big fillip for Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, whose leadership abilities had been under the scanner of the Aam Aadmi Party high command for the past few months, the ruling party Saturday won the byelections to three of the four assembly constituencies. The wins have taken the party’s tally to 95 in Punjab’s 117-seat assembly.
Party chief Arvind Kejriwal, who wanted to showcase AAP’s performance in Punjab ahead of the Delhi assembly elections in 2025, had taken over nearly direct control of the government in Punjab, relegating Mann to the sidelines, over the past two months. The party’s central leadership had been unhappy with the party’s dismal show in the state in the Lok Sabha elections. Saturday’s victory is expected to bring Mann back from the woods, reasserting his authority.
The Congress won a single seat, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost all four, with its candidates losing their security deposits on three. The fourth main party in the state, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) had decided not to participate in these elections amid an ongoing leadership crisis.
While the state Congress president Pratap Singh Bajwa blamed SAD’s absence for AAP’s victory, knives were out in the BJP camp right after the results were declared, with Union Minister Ravneet Bittu blaming the lack of active involvement of the state BJP chief Sunil Jakhar for the party’s loss.
The AAP won the Chabbewal, Dera Baba Nanak and Gidderbaha seats, all of which were won by the Congress in the 2022 assembly polls, while the Congress won the Barnala seat that was previously occupied by AAP.
After the results, Kejriwal addressed a gathering in Delhi, claiming that the victory in Punjab was due to the success of the “Delhi governance model” that had brought the party to power in 2013, 2015 and 2020. “We have won the semi-final match in Punjab. We are obviously doing something right in the state,” he said.
Mann attributed the victory to Kejriwal’s leadership. “Had Kejriwal not started this movement from the Ramlila Maidan years ago, none of us would have been here. The party has always stood with the poor and the marginalised, and will continue to do so.”
For the Congress, the results have come as a shock, as it was expecting the bypolls to be a cakewalk after its solid performance in the parliamentary elections, where it won seven of the 13 seats, riding high on AAP’s growing unpopularity in the state. Saturday’s results have made it clear that the Congress will have to make a united and concerted effort to win the state back from AAP in 2027.
Punjab Congress chief and MP Amarinder Singh Raja Warring’s wife Amrita Warring lost the byelection in Gidderbaha. Raja Warring has already completed his term as the state party president and the Congress’s poor show may lead to a possible shake-up at the top.
For the BJP, the bypoll verdict served as yet another reminder that it would take a long time for the party to make any meaningful dent in Punjab’s political landscape. The results are likely to trigger some changes in the party’s leadership.
State chief Jakhar, a former Congress leader, 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. The party’s humiliating defeat in the bypolls steered by the original group is expected to make the party high command put its house in order in preparation for the 2027 assembly elections.
Talking to media persons, Minister Bittu said, “Though I don’t want to go into the matter, which will be sorted out internally by the party, had Jakhar ji taken interest in the byelections, the results would have been very different.”
He, however, added that he was glad that Raja Warring’s wife had 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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Three wins for AAP
Close relatives of three sitting Members of Parliament were in the fray in the high stakes byelections, for which voting took place on 20 November.
In the keenly contested Gidderbaha seat that witnessed a voter turnout of over 80 percent, Amrita Warring lost to Hardeep Singh Dimpy Dhillon of AAP. The assembly seat had been vacated by then MLA Raja Warring after he won the Ludhiana Lok Sabha seat. Dhillon won by a margin of 22,000 votes.
BJP candidate and former Punjab finance minister Manpreet Singh Badal, who had represented the seat for several years—first as an Akali and then as a Congressman—came in third.
A visibly disappointed Amrita Warring told media persons in Gidderbaha, “The Akali Dal asked its voters to back the AAP, which seems to have led to the defeat.” She was being viewed as the hot favourite to win the seat that had been nurtured by her husband for 13 years.
Dera Baba Nanak, a border seat in the Majha region, was won by AAP candidate Gurdeep Singh Randhawa. The seat had fallen vacant after sitting Congress MLA Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa won the Gurdaspur parliamentary seat. The constituency witnessed a tough contest between Sukhjinder Singh’s wife Jatinder Kaur and Gurdeep Singh, who won by over 5,700 votes. BJP’s Ravi Karan Singh Kahlon managed to get barely 6,500 votes.
AAP also won the reserved Chabbewal seat, held previously by Dr Raj Kumar Chhabewal, who had won the Lok Sabha elections from Hoshiarpur. He had been elected the Chabbewal MLA on a Congress ticket, but had joined AAP ahead of the general election. His son Ishaank, also a medical doctor, won the seat, defeating Congress’s candidate Ranjit Kumar by a margin of over 28,600 votes. The BJP candidate Sohan Singh Thandal secured less than 10,000 votes.
Barnala saw a neck-and-neck contest, in which Congress candidate Kuldeep Singh Dhillon defeated AAP’s Harinder Singh Dhaliwal by a slim margin of a little over 2,000 votes. BJP candidate Kewal Singh Dhillon got almost 18,000 votes. AAP rebel Gurdeep Singh Batth, who had contested as an Independent, got almost 17,000 votes, playing spoilsport for AAP in the constituency.
Talking to media persons, Congress president Bajwa said that AAP’s loss in Barnala is a personal loss for the chief minister who started his political career from there.
“It was the most important fort of AAP that has been destroyed. On the other seats, which the Congress has lost, it is hardly a victory for AAP as they have won on the back of votes that shifted from the Akalis. Had the Akalis contested, we would have won all four seats. For the AAP, it’s only a technical victory, not a real one,” claimed Bajwa.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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