Jalandhar all set for four-cornered electoral battle

The Jalandhar Lok Sabha constituency is all set to witness a four-cornered contest between the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the Congress, the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bahujan Samaj Party (SAD-BJP) alliance and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Nineteen candidates are in fray for the bypoll to be held on May 10 after the process of withdrawal of nominations concluded on Monday. No candidate withdrew his/her nomination after the scrutiny of documents on April 21.

The byelection was necessitated after Santokh Singh Chaudhary, the sitting MP, died of a heart attack during Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra on January 14.

The AAP has fielded turncoat Sushil Kumar Rinku, while the Congress has reposed trust in Chaudhary family by giving ticket to Santokh’s wife Karamjit Kaur Chaudhary.

From the SAD-BSP, sitting MLA from Banga Sukhwinder Kumar Sukhi is in fray, while the BJP has chosen Inder Iqbal Singh Atwal, who had switched to the saffron party after snapping ties with the SAD.

For the ruling AAP, it is 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 2022 assembly elections. In the 2022 polls, the Congress had won in five out of nine segments in the Jalandhar parliamentary constituency, while the AAP bagged the remaining assembly seats.

At the same time, stakes are high for the Congress too, which managed to put up a united show at the nomination filing of Karamjit on April 14. The party is going through a credibility crisis in the state, particularly following its defeat in the 2022 assembly elections. Most 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 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 alleged cases of 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, is presently having only three MLAs in the Vidhan Sabha.

In fact, the BJP also stares at a 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 on 73 of total 117 seats, but could only win two — Pathankot and Mukerian — with a vote share of just 6.6%.