Jalandhar prefers ‘outsider’ Channi over party hoppers

Deepkamal Kaur

Jalandhar, June 4

Rejecting all local party hoppers from the Jalandhar (reserved) Lok Sabha seat, electors chose to give a thumbs up to ‘outsider’ Congress candidate and former Punjab Chief Minister Charanjit Channi by making him win by a huge margin of 1,75,993 votes. As many as 3,90,053 voters gave their mandate for him.

Highest lead from Nakodar

The Jalandhar Lok Sabha results showed up several surprising elements on Tuesday. As Congress candidate Charanjit Channi emerged victorious, he pulled up the highest lead of 20,673 votes from the Nakodar segment. It was in this segment that the Congress had not been expecting a good show as the party was on the third position during the 2022 Assembly polls and even in the May 2023 LS bypoll.

BJP candidate Sushil Rinku, sitting MP who had quit the AAP, came on a distant second position polling 2,14,060 votes. He was closely followed by AAP candidate Pawan Tinu, who had left SAD ahead of the polls. He got 2,08,889 votes. Former Congress MP Mohinder Singh Kaypee, who had left the Congress to join the SAD, polled only 67,911 votes. BSP’s Balwinder Kumar remained on the third position getting only 64,941 votes against his 2019 tally of 2.04 lakh votes.

2 former MPs lose to Channi

Charanjit Channi was fighting against two former MPs of Jalandhar. Sushil Rinku, who had won on the AAP ticket last year, lost to Channi on BJP ticket this time. Likewise, Channi’s nephew Manraj’s father-in-law MS Kaypee also remained MP from Jalandhar in 2009. He trailed behind Channi with a margin of 3.22 lakh votes. Kaypee had said that he had chosen to contest to take revenge over the humiliation that he had faced at the time of allotment of ticket for the Adampur Assembly seat in 2022, but clearly his purpose did not get solved.

Two ex-Cong leaders fail to make impact

It was being expected that since two former Congress leaders were also in the fray, they would cut down on Channi’s votes because of a common vote share, but this did not happen. Rinku, who was Congress MLA from 2017 to 2022, was the BJP candidate this time. He had been a Congress councillor for two terms prior to 2017. MS Kaypee, who spent more than three decades of his political career with the Congress, was also expected to eat into the vote share of Channi from the city as well as periphery, but he himself got decimated.