Chandigarh: Businessman, chartered accountant, and co-author of the book Sunrays, senior BJP leader Sanjay Tandon’s moment in the sun arrived Wednesday when he was named the party’s candidate for the lone Chandigarh seat, a coveted parliamentary constituency, given the city’s unique status as the common capital of Punjab and Haryana.
The BJP passed on the baton for Chandigarh to the 60-year-old after sitting MP Kirron Kher stepped aside citing ill health.
The businessman-politician is the son of former Punjab politician and Chhattisgarh governor Balramji Das Tandon, who died in 2018.
It has been a long wait for Tandon since Kher has been representing the seat since 2014, chosen despite being labelled an “outsider” by the party’s local unit.
“Patience is the biggest virtue a politician can have,” Tandon, the head of Competent Synergies, told the media after the declaration of his candidature on Wednesday. “My predecessors have worked hard for Chandigarh and that is what I intend to do as well… Carry forward their good work,” he said, adding that he belonged as much to Chandigarh as to Punjab.
Tandon has authored a series of inspirational stories called Sunrays, along with his wife Priya, the daughter of M.M. Punchhi who retired as the Chief Justice of India.
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Rise steadily up the ranks
Sanjay Tandon began his political journey helping the BJP campaign for the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat in 1991, followed by Jalandhar in 1993 and the Assembly polls in Rajpura in 2002.
He was made general secretary of the Chandigarh BJP in 2007 and president of the Chandigarh unit in 2010.
Tandon’s candidature set off a din of murmurs in the deeply divided Chandigarh unit of the party. Former MP Satyapal Jain, hopeful for a ticket, was ignored as was former mayor Arun Sood. Sood had replaced Tandon as BJP president.
Meanwhile, Kher’s name was not among the four names recommended by the party’s election committee last month. A close aide told ThePrint she had chosen to stay out of the race due to her health.
The actor-politician emerged as a giant killer in 2014, defeating three-time Congress MP Pawan Bansal. In 2019, Kher defeated Bansal and veteran leader Harmohan Dhawan, who was the AAP candidate. She was said to be virtually absent from the constituency in her second term.
Prestige fight for BJP, INDIA bloc
The Chandigarh BJP was in the news this year for a bungled mayoral election for the Chandigarh municipality. The AAP-Congress combine lost to the BJP despite having the numbers, but the outcome was overturned at the direction of the Supreme Court which found that the returning officer, a BJP office bearer, had indulged in “misdemeanour” during the counting of votes.
The top court later restored the mayorship of the AAP-Congress joint candidate.
Though the two constituents of the Opposition’s INDIA bloc had come together for the city elections, they do not have a tie-up for the Punjab Lok Sabha polls, a state the AAP rules.
They are yet to announce candidates though the Congress is expected to field Bansal. During the mayoral polls, he had actively supported the AAP.
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
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