Namesakes failed to dent candidates’ poll prospects
Bathinda: Of the many tricks in the election trade, namesakes are perhaps the most common. But not all get their name’s worth. A certain Manpreet Singh from Badal village walked away with all the limelight as he landed up with not just the Badal surname but also the People’s Party of Punjab’s poll symbol of kite in the high-stakes clash between Harsimrat Badal and brother-inlaw Manpreet in Bathinda.
Though the votes he polled had no bearing on the outcome, his getting a good number of votes without campaigning shows that voters do get confused by the namesake candidates.
In Amritsar, Arun Jaitley’s namesake Arun Joshi stood as an independent and sought a poll symbol that resembled the BJP’s lotus. The applicant wrote to the Election Commission seeking the cabbage as a symbol. He instead got the badminton shuttle, a poor lookalike.
But with shuttle too, he managed to poll 9,022 votes, higher than Manpreet’s Bathinda namesake who polled over 4,600.
However in all these cases, the votes polled to the namesakes had no bearing on the final results. The namesake of Capt Amarinder Singh in Amritsar secured 1,151 votes.
SAD candidate Harsimrat Badal defeated her rival Manpreet Badal by a slender margin of 19,395 votes. Had the contest been tighter, the votes polled to the namesake could have made the difference.
Both Congress candidate Joginder Singh and SAD’s Paramjit Kaur Gulshan in Faridkot faced namesake candidates. Both faced defeat at the hands of AAP candidate Sadhu Singh.
The namesake of Joginder Singh polled 2,667 votes whereas independent Paramjit Kaur Gulshan polled 1,623 votes. In Ludhiana, independent Simarjeet Singh Bains got 2,10,917 votes whereas his namesake Simarjeet Singh could bag only 3,980 votes. Similarly, Bhagwant Singh, namesake of AAP candidate Bhagwant Mann in Sangrur, polled only 2,334 votes whereas Mann’s victory margin was over 2 lakh votes.