Despite established cadre, Akali Dal put up poor show

Aman Sood

Patiala, June 5

The Congress’ Dr Dharamavira Gandhi, who won the Patiala seat, managed to lead in only two of the nine Vidhan Sabha constituencies that are part of the Patiala Lok Sabha segment. Dr Gandhi defeated AAP’s Dr Balbir Singh by a relatively small margin of 14,831 votes.

BJP’s Preneet Kaur, who lost narrowly to Dr Balbir Singh, led in three Vidhan Sabha halqas but still lost the polls. Balbir Singh topped in four halqas while SAD’s NK Sharma could not lead in even one.

Dr Gandhi polled 3,05,616 votes followed by Dr Balbir with 2,90,785 and Preneet Kaur with 2,88,998. SAD’s NK Sharma fetched 1,53,978 votes.

Shriomani Akali Dal’s candidate NK Sharma performed poorly in all nine halqas of the Patiala Lok Sabha constituency with his worst performance being from Patiala (Urban) where the party could garner only 4,634 votes compared to 41,548 clocked by BJP’s Preneet Kaur and 23,035 votes polled by the winning candidate.

A senior SAD leader said it is time for introspection as it is the lowest vote count the party has got from Patiala (Urban) in the past four elections and that the situation is compounded by the fact that despite having a full-fledged cadre in the city, the vote count dropped to under 5,000. “In the coming days, the performance of all the local leaders will be taken to task as the results are quite bad in terms of the efforts put in by the senior leadership,” he said.

Interestingly, NK Sharma performed poorly and stood fourth in his home segment of Derabassi, which is part of the Mohali district, where he managed only 33,748 votes while the Congress got 46,621, the BJP topped with 65,742 and the AAP candidate Dr Balbir Singh got 36,390.

The SAD candidate lost badly in Rajpura where the BJP bagged the maximum of 37,430 votes compared to 32,032 bagged by Dr Gandhi and 22,336 by the AAP. The SAD’s poor performance was also reflected in Shutrana, another rural segment, where the outfit got just 14,118 votes compared to 32,499 of the AAP, 27,353 of Dr Gandhi and 24,501 by Preneet Kaur.

Further, the SAD could only gather 16,328 votes in the rural segment of Ghanaur, slightly better than 14,764 votes of Preneet Kaur while Dr Gandhi led by 37,633 votes. In Sanaur, the SAD could gather only 19,497 votes while Dr Gandhi got 37,846 votes followed by 25,670 by Preneet Kaur and Dr Balbir Singh who got the maximum 43,048 votes.

In Patiala (Rural) too SAD lacklustre performance was reflected in its vote count of 15,182, which is almost half of what the nearest rival candidate garnered. In the same segment, Dr Balbir got 37,446 votes followed by Dr Gandhi with 34,985 and Preneet Kaur with 30,320 votes. In Nabha, Dr Gandhi managed 36,230 votes as compared to 32,577 votes by Dr Balbir Singh, 22,198 by Preneet Kaur and 18,345 by SAD’s NK Sharma.

Time to introspect

A senior SAD leader said it is time for introspection as it is the lowest vote count the party got from Patiala (Urban) in the past four polls and that the situation is compounded by the fact that despite having a full-fledged cadre in the city, the vote count dropped to under 5,000.