With lead in five segments, Chabbewal still a loser

Deepkamal Kaur/Sanjiv Bakshi

Tribune News Service

Hoshiarpur, May 24

Despite getting lead in five of the nine Assembly segments, Congress candidate Raj Kumar Chabbewal was drubbed by a margin of 48,530 votes in the Hoshiarpur parliamentary constituency. BJP’s Som Parkash, who had a lead in four Assembly segments, has won the seat.

While Chabbewal had a lead in Chabbewal constituency, where he is an MLA, and other four segments — Sri Hargobindpur, Bholath, Urmar and Sham Churasi —he trailed with very heavy margin from the other four constituencies, including Hoshiarpur, represented by Industries Minister Sunder Sham Arora.

Of the nine Assembly seats in the constituency, seven are represented by Congress MLAs. Chabbewal himself faced a loss in votes from his own constituency, making a lead of only 7,616 votes against his 2017 Assembly poll margin of 29,261. Congress remained up in Hargobindpur by 15,302 votes, Sham Churasi by 3,596 votes, Bholath by 506 and Urmur 416 votes.

The BJP remained triumphant in Mukerian, making a huge margin of 43,706 from here alone, where Congress MLA Rajnish Babbi is learnt to be unwell for quite some time.

In Dasuya, it had a gain of 22,773 votes. A day after the result, Dasuya MLA Micky Dogra reportedly went unwell today.

A retired IAS officer, Som Parkash, himself improved his margin from 2,000 in the last Assembly polls to 5,146 now in Phagwara. Even in Industries Minister Sunder Sham Arora’s Hoshiarpur constituency, Som Parkash got a lead of 8,804 votes.

In 2009 Lok Sabha polls, when he had contested from here against Congress’ Santosh Chowdhary, he had trailed by just 366 votes.

The dissent shown by former Union MoS and ex-MP Vijay Sampla perhaps had a negligible effect. Sampla’s comment comparing his ticket denial with ‘gau hatya’ rather went against him within the BJP cadres.

His persisting anger despite the party’s attempt of patch up reflected from his son Sahil Sampla’s post on FB on May 22 evening, “Mujhe girakar agar tum sambhal sako toh chalo” (If you can go on after making me fall, you may go).

At the same time, his protégé Sheetal Angural, who resigned from national BJP SC cell, posted a rather slanderous message against Som Parkash.

Even today, Sampla chose to give all credit to the Prime Minister. “It is the victory of Modi’s policies. His magic has made its impact. Our hearty wish was ‘Modi Again’. It has come true and I am happy that Hoshiarpur has contributed to it fully,” he said.

The Congress dissident and former Union MoS Santosh Chowdhary too reacted, “It’s shocking. I was not expecting such a bad result. I always wanted my party to win this election, especially from the constituency from where I had been an MP and remained a minister in the Union government, but such a defeat is really sad. The margin is something unexpected.”