AAP back in Lok Sabha

The win of AAP candidate Sushil Rinku, who left the Congress weeks before the Jalandhar byelection, marks the party’s re-entry into the Lok Sabha. Rinku defeated his nearest rival, Congress candidate Karamjit Kaur Chaudhary, by a big margin of over 58,000 votes. This is a huge leg-up in many ways for AAP, the ruling party in Punjab. With this triumph, the party has consolidated its position in the state a year after its resounding victory in the Assembly elections. After Bhagwant Mann resigned as MP from Sangrur to contest the 2022 Assembly poll, there had been no AAP representative in the Lok Sabha. The party had suffered a massive setback when the Sangrur seat was won by SAD (Amritsar) veteran Simranjit Singh Mann, who edged past AAP’s Gurmail Singh in the bypoll held last June.

Regaining the electoral mandate, thus, indicates that the Arvind Kejriwal-led party learnt lessons from the Sangrur debacle and left no stone unturned to woo the voters. It is a vindication of the policies that AAP has rolled out in Punjab since it came to power in March 2022 — mainly providing free units of power and establishing mohalla clinics, besides giving government jobs to thousands of young applicants.

The main rival parties — the Congress, BJP and SAD — fell by the wayside in the Jalandhar battle. Finishing second, the Congress lost its stronghold. Even during the 2022 Assembly elections that witnessed an AAP surge across the state, the Congress had bucked the trend in Jalandhar. A poor show in the bypoll is a new low for the SAD, which recently lost its towering leader, five-time CM Parkash Singh Badal. A formidable force in Punjab politics for decades, the party ended up third in Jalandhar. The SAD direly needs to reconnect with the masses to regain lost ground in Punjab. The BJP, which was the SAD’s junior ally in the state till they parted ways over the Central farm laws in 2021, finished fourth. It’s obvious that the party’s strategy of poaching state Congress leaders has not turned the tide so far.