Gurdaspur not just Jakhar’s loss

Ravi Dhaliwal

Tribune News Service

Gurdaspur, June 3

Five Congress legislators are in a spot as they failed to secure leads from their respective constituencies for party candidate Sunil Jakhar, who lost the Gurdaspur seat to BJP’s Sunny Deol.

They are Aruna Chaudhury (Dinanagar), Amit Vij (Pathankot), Joginder Pal (Bhoa), Barindermeet Singh Pahra (Gurdaspur) and Fatehjung Singh Bajwa (Qadian). All of them had performed well in the 2017 bypoll.

Only Tript Rajinder Singh Bajwa (Fatehgarh Churian) and Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa (Dera Baba Nanak) stood tall and defied Deol’s onslaught. Both are senior Cabinet ministers.

Dinanagar saw the maximum damage being inflicted on the party not in terms of the margin of defeat but for the fact that it was a Cabinet minister who failed to deliver.

From Aruna Chaudhury’s constituency, the losing margin is 20,000. Local BJP leaders, however, are flummoxed at the turn of events because their party managed to win big time despite the fact that the alliance was in a state of total disarray in this Assembly seat.

The scars of defeat run deep for Amit Vij. In the bypoll, he had secured a lead of 11,000 votes. This time, the party trailed by 30,000 votes in his constituency, which means 41,000 votes vanished from the Congress kitty in just 18 months.

“This is despite the fact that Vij and Jakhar established the Rs 1200 crore employment generating Pepsico bottling and dairy plant. The city has Anil Vasudeva, a senior BJP functionary, as its Mayor while the MLA is a Congressman. The clash of egos means development has often been a big causality. Voters took non-development as an issue against the Punjab government. The MLA has cut a sorry figure and is now busy trying to figure out where and what went wrong for him,” said a former BJP minister.

In Bhoa, the Congress vote share saw a shift of 56,000 votes, the largest in the constituency. “MLA Joginder Pal still does not know what hit him and, after getting such a raw deal, it will be quite some time before he manages to see eye to eye with Jakhar,” averred a colleague of the MLA.

In Qadian and Gurdaspur, where the BJP managed slender leads, the party was defeated but not disgraced like in other Congress-ruled seats. “A defeat is nevertheless a defeat. Margins are irrelevant. Our candidate has had to eat humble pie because of us,” said a sitting MLA.