Rana Gurjit continues his winning streak in K’thala

Rachna Khaira

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, March 11

Not coming as a much surprise, Congress candidate Rana Gurjit has won the Assembly elections for the record fifth time in Kapurthala.

Also, AAP leader Sukhpal Khaira opened the party’s account from here. While the BJP could only win one seat from Phagwara, the lone in entire Doaba region, Congress candidate Navtej Cheema, too, won the Sultanpur Lodhi seat by a huge margin.

While the Congress leader Rana Gurjit, the richest candidate this time, won the Kapurthala seat by getting 56,378 votes, another Congress leader Navtej Cheema won the Sultanpur Lodhi seat by getting 41,848 votes.

The AAP candidate Sukhpal Khaira won the Bholath constituency seat by winning 48,873 votes and Som Prakash of the BJP remained the lone BJP candidate from Doaba to have won any seat by getting 45,479 votes.

Also, BJP’s Som Prakash became the lone candidate in Doaba to have won a seat for the saffron party.

No looking back for Rana Gurjit

Known to be a politician made by chance, Rana has defeated his Akali rival Paramjit Singh by 28,817 votes. While Rana got 56,378 votes, Paramjit could only get 27,561 votes. Rana first met Punjab Congress president Captain Amarinder Singh regarding a business problem in 1999. Despite having no links in Kapurthala, he was offered the seat and became an MLA in 2002. In 2004, again on Amarinder’s call, he contested the Lok Sabha poll from Jalandhar and defeated former Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral’s son Naresh Gujral. In the 2007 Assembly elections, Rana’s wife Har Bans Rana became an MLA owing to his popularity. In 2009, Rana unsuccessfully contested from the Khadoor Sahib Lok Sabha seat and became the Kapurthala MLA in 2012. Surprisingly, since Rana’s inclusion in the Congress, the party has never lost the Assembly or Lok Sabha seat from Kapurthala in the last seven elections.

Khaira maintains calm despite big win

Even though Sukhpal Khaira won by a huge margin of 8,282 votes, he maintained calm and quietly left the counting booth without even collecting his certificate from the Election Returning Officer (ERO). Though Khaira was very hopeful about the AAP win in the elections initially, he later accepted that the results were not as expected by the party and needed introspection.

The RCF factor in Sultanpur Lodhi

It were the 18,000 votes of the rail coach factory, falling in the Sultanpur Lodhi constituency, which gave the final tilt to the winning candidate at Sultanpur Lodhi. Though Congress candidate Navtej Cheema and Akali leader Dr Upinderjit Kaur were running neck and neck till the fifth round, it was only in the sixth round when the RCF ballot boxes began to open that Cheema took the lead and managed to secure win by a margin of 8,162 votes.

Bibi Jagir Kaur bites the dust as Yuvraj loses

Bibi Jagir Kaur’s son-in-law Yuvraj Bhupinder Singh too lost badly to AAP candidate Sukhpal Khaira. Though Bibi faced a stiff opposition from the party cadre who insisted upon her to get a ticket for her daughter and not for the son-in-law, Bibi made Yuvraj the front-runner from Bholath, a stronghold of the Lubana community. Though Yuvraj was leading by around 1,500 votes till the fifth round, he began to trail Khaira in the sixth round when the counting of votes from Nadala to Dhilwan belt began. The area was a stronghold of the Jatt community who supported Khaira in every election.