Chandigarh: Former Union minister and sitting Congress MP from Anandpur Sahib, Manish Tewari, won the single Lok Sabha seat of Chandigarh, defeating his nearest rival, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate Sanjay Tandon, with a thin margin of 2,504 votes.
According to the Election Commission data, while Tewari secured 2,16,657 votes, Tandon got 2,14,153.
Tewari was the joint candidate of the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party, and has managed to wrest the seat from the BJP after 10 years.
Grateful to Chandigarh and my beloved people for their blessings in making me win the elections.
This is the victory of justice, peace and stability over divisiveness politics- a true win for democracy.
The people of Chandigarh are the torchbearers of safeguarding our… pic.twitter.com/YHnmy3J5tH— Manish Tewari (@ManishTewari) June 4, 2024
Actor-turned-politician Kirron Kher held the seat for the last two terms. She was replaced as the BJP candidate by Tandon this time, following health issues.
59-year-old Tewari belongs to the city of Chandigarh, where his father V.N. Tiwari, a Punjabi author and professor at the Panjab University, and a Rajya Sabha MP, was killed by militants in 1984 in Sector 24 during his morning walk. His mother Amrit Tewari was a dentist at the PGIMER.
Tewari completed his graduation from Panjab University, Chandigarh and went on to study law in Delhi. He was elected to the Lok Sabha for the first time in 2009 from Ludhiana, and was the Union minister of information and broadcasting in UPA II.
He did not contest the 2014 parliamentary elections, citing ill health. In 2019, he contested from the Anandpur Sahib seat, which he won. This time, however, he shifted from Punjab to the Union Territory of Chandigarh, saying that it was his home ground.
Tandon, 60, is the son of former Punjab BJP leader Balramji Das Tandon, who also served as the governor of Chhattisgarh. Sanjay Tandon was the president of the Chandigarh unit of BJP for ten years from 2010 to 2020.
Apart from alliance with the AAP and his connection with the city, Tewari seems to have also gained from the debacle suffered by the BJP during the mayoral elections earlier this year.
The election of the mayor of the municipal corporation had made national headlines, when the Supreme Court took cognisance of AAP’s complaints that BJP had rigged the elections to have its candidate elected. The apex court had come down heavily on the Chandigarh BJP, and restored the joint candidate of the AAP and the Congress.
The AAP and the Congress had come together for the mayoral elections which were being projected as the first elections in the country of the INDIA bloc.
Though Chandigarh has a single Lok Sabha seat, it is prestigious because the city has the unique position of being the common capital of two states, Punjab and Haryana, which happens to be a bone of contention between the two states, both of which lay their exclusive claim to the city. Chandigarh is a union territory governed by the Centre.
In an interview to ThePrint, Tewari had conceptualised Chandigarh as a state unit like New Delhi.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)