Cong wins Gurdaspur Lok Sabha bypoll by 1.9L votes
GURDASPUR: Maintaining its winning streak in Punjab seven months after returning to power in the state, the Congress notched up a big victory in the Gurdaspur Lok Sabha byelection on Sunday as its candidate Sunil Jakhar defeated his Bharatiya Janata Party rival by nearly 2 lakh votes, the highest ever in the parliamentary seat’s history.
Jakhar polled 4,99,752 votes, while BJP’s Swaran Singh Salaria got 3,65,033 votes. Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate Maj Gen Suresh Khajuria (retd) polled only 23,579 votes and lost his deposit.
Jakhar established his lead from the very beginning of the counting of votes and kept at it in all the nine assembly segments of Gurdaspur parliamentary constituency, where a bypoll was necessitated after the demise of actor Vinod Khanna, who contested five elections from Gurdaspur as BJP candidate and won four of them.
Jakhar described the victory as a referendum on the Narendra Modi government at the Centre.
“The verdict is against the Goods and Service Tax (GST) and other policies of the BJP. Today, even the traditional vote-bank of the BJP also left it. They either didn’t turn up to vote or voted for the Congress. This victory is the beginning of the downfall of BJP and countdown to 2019 parliamentary polls,” he added.
Though both SAD-BJP and AAP had fought the election on “failure” of Congress to implement its lofty poll promises and pitching an “outsider” in Gurdaspur — Jakhar hails from Abohar in Malwa belt.
But the SAD-BJP remained on the backfoot after surfacing of rape charges against former Akali strongman of the area, Sucha Singh Langah and later an old rape complaint against Salaria himself.