Chandigarh: India’s former ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu of the BJP was relegated to the third position in the tough four-cornered contest in Amritsar.
The holy city has continued to elude the BJP for the past 10 years.
Congress sitting MP Gurjeet Singh Aujla retained the seat, winning by a margin of 40,301 votes. His nearest rival was cabinet minister and Aam Aadmi Party candidate Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal.
While Aujla secured 2,55,181 votes, Dhaliwal got 2,14,880 votes and Sandhu secured 2,07,205 votes. The Shiromani Akali Dal candidate Anil Joshi came in 4th with 1,62,896 votes.
The BJP has been trying to wrest back the seat from the Congress ever since former chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh won this seat in 2014, defeating Union Minister Arun Jaitley. Another Union minister, Hardeep Singh Puri, lost the seat to Aujla in the 2019 elections.
Daya Singh Sodhi of the BJP won this seat for the first time in 1998, while cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu was the MP from this seat three times while he was in the BJP.
Sandhu’s campaign mainly focused on his connect with the city. Sandhu is the grandson of Teja Singh Samundri, a leading Akali leader who was one of the founder members of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and a leading figure of the gurdwara reform movement of the 1920s. Sandhu is a 1988 batch Indian Foreign Service officer. He retired in January this year and joined the BJP two months later.
Sandhu’s wife Reenat is also a diplomat and at present, the ambassador of India to the Netherlands.
Though initially overawed by the hurly burly of politics, and especially ruffled by the constant disruption of his campaign by protesting farmers, Sandhu however picked up his campaign in the last few weeks before elections.
Union Minister Smriti Irani and BJP national president J. P. Nadda held rallies in Amritsar in Sandhu’s support.
Aujla, 52, is an agriculturist and builder. He belongs to Amritsar where he completed his education. His connect with the people of Amritsar has remained personal and genteel throughout the five years of his tenure as MP. He has remained largely non-controversial.
Considered a self-made politician, he entered Parliament after winning a bye election in 2017 when Capt Amarinder resigned from the Lok Sabha to contest the Punjab assembly elections.
Aujla was president of the Amritsar District Congress Committee (rural) at that time and was given the ticket to contest from the Amritsar seat. He defeated BJP candidate Rajinder Mohan Singh Chhina by a margin of almost 2 lakh votes. He also became a member of the standing committee on external affairs that year.
Aujla again won the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat, defeating Puri by a margin of 99,626 votes, getting 51.70 percent of the votes.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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