Cong regains lost ground in Bholath, Banga

Deepkamal Kaur
Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, May 25

The Congress that lost its security deposit on two of its seats of Doaba in 2017 Assembly poll — Bholath and Banga — seems to have recovered its ground on both seats in the recently concluded Lok Sabha poll. While Bholath is a part of the Hoshiarpur LS seat, Banga is a part of the Anandpur Sahib seat.

While the party is now number one in Bholath, it has fallen marginally behind the BSP candidate from the Banga seat. In Bholath, the party has risen from its tally of 5,923 votes to 32,428 votes, going almost six times up. With Rana Ranjit Singh, who had contested from the seat in the previous Assembly poll, still as the halqa in-charge, Congress Lok Sabha candidate Raj Kumar Chabbewal got a lead of 506 seats here against the SAD-BJP.

Ever since Sukhpal Khaira, who was the earlier Congress MLA in 2007 and then AAP MLA in 2017 here, moved to Bathinda as the Punjab Ekta Party candidate, the party graph here fell from 48,873 to just 1,143 votes here. Since former SAD minister Jagir Kaur moved as SAD candidate to Khadoor Sahib in the Lok Sabha poll, her graph too has fallen by nearly 9,000 votes – from 40,671 to 31,922 votes. Now that both old rivals, Khaira and Jagir Kaur, have performed badly in their new turfs, none of them is pointing fingers at each other.

In the recent LS poll, even the BSP has a larger presence here this time from the seat going almost 19 times up — from 513 to 9,366 — or else the Congress would have gone further up.

Both Chabbewal and Rana Ranjit claim that they had worked hard in the constituency for the past six months or so to restore the position for the party. The loss of the Congress from the seat in 2017 had also come since the party could not pick any leader from here after Khaira moved to AAP. It was just after elections were then announced that it announced the name of former MLA Gurbinder Atwal from here but left the campaign midway. Rana Ranjit came as the option in the nick of time and he could not make a campaign.

In Banga, the BSP cadre perhaps tried to avenge the anger against the SAD and the Congress for picking away their candidates and showed their strength against them. The Congress had roped in BSP leaders Rajinder Thekedar and Mohan Lal while the sitting Akali MLA here, Dr Sukhwinder Sukhi, too had been in the BSP but still without a local leader, the party managed to remain on the top slot with as many as 36,057 votes for this Assembly seat, falling under the Anandpur Sahib Lok Sabha seat.