AAP fails to impress electorates

Aakanksha N Bhardwaj

Jalandhar, June 4

A year ago, by-elections to the Jalandhar Lok Sabha were held following the death of then Congress MP Santokh Chaudhary. Then Sushil Kumar Rinku from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was elected as the MP. But, Rinku changed his party and joined the BJP in January this year. Jalandhar, June 4

A year later, the scenario has changed with Congress’s Charanjit Singh Channi winning the seat with a huge margin and AAP’s candidate standing third. After Sushil Rinku left AAP, the party had fielded turncoat Pawan Kumar Tinu who was earlier with the Shiromani Akali Dal. But, he clearly couldn’t impress the voters.

Congress candidate and former CM Charanjit Singh Channi registered a win by a huge margin of over 1.7 lakh in Jalandhar. A total of 3,90,053 votes were cast in favour of Channi while Pawan Kumar Tinu bagged 2,08,889 votes.

The moment former SAD MLA Pawan Tinu had joined the AAP, visited Jalandhar and held meetings with those councillors who were “ready” to switch their sides. He was trying to stop AAP councillors from joining the BJP.

With Pawan Tinu getting an AAP ticket for the Lok Sabha elections, party leaders had thought that finally, they would have their “say” in the municipal corporation (MC). “We quit the Congress and joined AAP because we thought that it would be easier for us to get work done in the municipal corporation. But, soon we found that there were two or three people who had the powers and we didn’t have any say. We felt less important. None of us was able to get our work done,” one of the party leaders said.

But the results couldn’t come up to the expectations of the party leaders.