The Aam Aadmi Party is set to win the by-election to the Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat. As of 2 PM, AAP candidate Sushil Kumar Rinku had a lead of more than 58,000 votes over his Congress rival Karamjit Kaur Chaudhary.
As of 2 PM, these were the numbers on the Election Commission of India results website:
AAP: 3,02,097
Congress: 2,43,450
BJP: 134706
SAD: 158354
The bypoll was necessitated following the demise of Congress MP Santokh Singh Chaudhary.
The Congress had fielded Chaudhary's widow Karamjit Kaur Chaudhary while AAP had fielded former Congress MLA Sushil Kumar Rinku who joined the party on the eve of the election.
As of 10 AM, 3.13 lakh votes had been counted out of the 8.87 lakh votes that had been polled. The voter turnout was 54.70 percent.
The Congress would be disappointed with the result as it had won five out of nine Assembly segments in Jalandhar in the 2022 Assembly elections.
The SAD and BJP also made their presence felt in the area but failed to save their deposits.
The SAD-Amritsar could secure just over two percent votes. The party had secured a surprise win in the Sangrur bypoll last year.
On a lighter note, Independent candidate Neetu Shattran Wala, whose video had gone viral in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections complaining that even his family didn't vote for him, performed unexpectedly well. He got over 4500 votes.
Relief for AAP, Disappointment for Congress
The win is a shot in the arm for AAP, which has said that the victory is an affirmation of people's satisfaction with the work done by the Bhagwant Mann government.
The government had been facing a lot of flak since the assassination of Sidhu Moose Wala last year. Now the party can claim that the Sangrur loss was a one-time reaction to the assassination of Moose Wala and not a reflection of its performance.
The Congress would be disappointed with its performance. Jalandhar has been its bastion not just in Punjab but across the country. It has lost the seat for the first time since 1998 when it was defeated by former PM Inder Kumar Gujral, fighting on a Janata Dal ticket with Akali support.
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