Chandigarh, May 10 (). Voting for the bypoll to Jalandhar parliamentary seat in Punjab began on Wednesday amid tight security. The Dalit-dominated Doaba region has traditionally been a Congress bastion.
Voters started arriving at the polling stations even before the polling began at 8 am.
The polling will continue till 6 pm. A total of 16.21 lakh voters are eligible to vote. There are 19 candidates, including four women, in the fray.
Around 8,000 security personnel have been deployed. The counting of votes will take place on Saturday.
The bypoll is being held due to the death of Congress MP Santokh Chowdhary due to a heart attack while participating in the Punjab leg of the Bharat Jodo Yatra in January.
The Congress, which has been undefeated since 1999, has fielded Chaudhary’s widow Karamjit Kaur as its candidate, while the state’s ruling Aam Aadmi Party has given ticket to Sushil Rinku, a former MLA who left the Congress and joined the party.
The Shiromani Akali Dal-Bahujan Samaj Party (SAD-BSP) alliance has fielded sitting MLA Sukhwinder Kumar Sukhi. BJP has given ticket to former MLA Inder Iqbal Singh Atwal, who joined the party from Akali Dal.
The Jalandhar bypoll is being termed as an important electoral battle for all political parties ahead of the 2024 general elections.
After facing a humiliating defeat less than a year ago, the 13-month-old AAP government is set for an ordeal. Victory or defeat here will be considered a public review of his administrative and leadership skills.
The Aam Aadmi Party suffered a major setback in June 2022 when Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar)’s Simranjit Singh Mann won the Sangrur Lok Sabha seat by defeating his nearest rival Gurmail Singh of AAP by a narrow margin.
The Sangrur seat used to be an AAP stronghold. Bhagwant Mann represented the seat twice – in 2014 and 2019. He left the Sangrur Lok Sabha seat in February 2022 after winning the assembly elections from Dhuri and became the Chief Minister.
For the Jalandhar bypolls, the Choudhary family is banking on Dalit votes because of their closeness to Dera Sachkhand Ballan which has a lot of influence in Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Nawanshahr and Kapurthala districts in the Doaba region.
AAP’s national convener Arvind Kejriwal and Mann jointly campaigned on Sunday by holding four roadshows in different assembly constituencies in a single day.
The constituency has 16,21,759 voters including 8,44,904 males, 7,76,855 females, 10,286 persons with disabilities, 1,850 service voters, 73 foreign voters and 41 transgenders.
Chief Electoral Officer Sibin C. said that 1,972 polling stations have been set up.
A total of 542 sensitive polling stations have been identified, 16 marked as sensitive and 30 as expenditure sensitive pockets.
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