Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate Sanjeev Arora on Monday won election from the Ludhiana West assembly seat in Punjab. He defeated Congress candidate Bharat Bhushan Ashu by a margin of 10,637 votes.
Arora secured a total of 35,179 votes while Ashu got 24,542 votes, according to the Election Commission data.
The AAP workers started celebrations over Arora’s victory in a fierce electoral fight.
From the beginning of counting, Arora took the lead.
Though the AAP nominee won, Ashu led fourth, fifth and sixth rounds of counting during which, the AAP candidate’s margin dropped.
After the first three rounds of counting, Arora was leading with a margin of 3,060 votes, which dipped to 2,286 votes after the sixth round.
However, Arora’s margin again started rising from the seventh round onwards.
There were total 14 candidates, including BJP’s Jiwan Gupta and Shiromani Akali Dal candidate Parupkar Singh Ghuman, in the fray and the counting of votes for the June 19 bypoll began at 8 AM at a centre set up in Khalsa College for Women in Ludhiana.
BJP’s Jiwan Gupta polled 20,323 votes while the Shiromani Akali Dal’s nominee Parupkar Singh Ghuman got 8,203 votes.
The bypoll was necessitated following the death of AAP MLA Gurpreet Bassi Gogi in January.
A voter turnout of 51.33 per cent was recorded in the bypoll, a sharp drop from the 64% voting registered in the 2022 state polls. There were a total of 1.75 lakh eligible voters for the bypoll.
The bypoll was seen as a litmus test for the Bhagwant Mann-led AAP government and the ruling party’s national leadership which aggressively campaigned to retain this seat.
People rejected both BJP, Congress in bypolls: Kejriwal
AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal on Monday said people are fed up with the BJP in Gujarat and stressed that people had rejected both Congress and BJP in the bypolls.
AAP leader Gopal Italia won the Visavadar seat, while BJP’s Rajendra Chavda bagged the Kadi seat on Monday, as counting for bypolls to the two constituencies in Gujarat concluded, officials said.
Kejriwal said the results of Ludhiana West show that the people of Punjab are very happy with the work of the government and they have given more votes as compared to 2022.
“The people of Gujarat are now fed up with BJP and they are seeing hope in Aam Aadmi Party,” he said in a post on X in Hindi.
