Chandigarh: On 26 June, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, along with his wife Dr Gurpreet Kaur, daughter Nayamat Kaur, sister Manpreet Kaur and mother-in-law Raj Kaur, landed near Jalandhar on a helicopter and headed to the upscale Royal Estate.
Sharing pictures with his wife and daughter, Mann wrote a post on X in Punjabi that said: “A few days ago, I mentioned that I am renting a house in Jalandhar. Today, I moved into a house in Jalandhar with my family. People from Majha and Doaba will no longer need to go to Chandigarh. I will address their issues and problems staying here. We are making every effort to reduce the inconvenience of the people and to establish direct contact with them.”
With the Jalandhar West assembly constituency — a seat reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC) — going to bypolls on 10 July, Mann has been camping round the clock in Jalandhar to ensure the victory of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate Mohinder Bhagat, who is pitted against former MLA Sheetal Angural, Surinder Kaur of the Congress and Surjit Kaur of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD).
Angural was elected to the Punjab assembly from Jalandhar West as an AAP candidate in 2022. He vacated the seat after quitting AAP to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on 24 March this year.
Sushil Kumar Rinku contested the Jalandhar Lok Sabha bypoll in April 2023 as an AAP candidate, and won. However, he quit AAP to join the BJP the same day as Angural. He then contested this year’s Lok Sabha polls on a BJP ticket, but lost to Congress’s Charanjit Singh Channi by a margin of 1.76 lakh votes.
Mann shifting his residence from Chandigarh to Jalandhar for an assembly bye-election and camping there day and night has surprised many.
ਪਿਛਲੇ ਦਿਨੀਂ ਮੈਂ ਕਿਹਾ ਸੀ ਕਿ ਜਲੰਧਰ ਘਰ ਕਿਰਾਏ 'ਤੇ ਲੈ ਰਿਹਾ ਹਾਂ.. ਮੈਂ ਅੱਜ ਜਲੰਧਰ ਵਿਖੇ ਪਰਿਵਾਰ ਸਮੇਤ ਘਰ ਵਿੱਚ ਆ ਗਿਆ ਹਾਂ… ਮਾਝੇ ਅਤੇ ਦੋਆਬੇ ਦੇ ਲੋਕਾਂ ਨੂੰ ਹੁਣ ਚੰਡੀਗੜ੍ਹ ਨਹੀਂ ਜਾਣਾ ਪਵੇਗਾ, ਉਹਨਾਂ ਦੀਆਂ ਸਮੱਸਿਆਵਾਂ ਤੇ ਮਸਲਿਆਂ ਦਾ ਇੱਥੇ ਰਹਿ ਕੇ ਹੀ ਨਿਪਟਾਰਾ ਕਰਾਂਗਾ…ਅਸੀਂ ਲੋਕਾਂ ਦੀ ਖੱਜਲ ਖ਼ੁਆਰੀ ਨੂੰ ਘਟਾਉਣ ਤੇ ਲੋਕਾਂ… pic.twitter.com/KYaKoJSkWs
— Bhagwant Mann (@BhagwantMann) June 26, 2024
“After he moved to Jalandhar, he went to Sangrur for a day and to Chandigarh for a few hours. The rest of the time, he has been camping in Jalandhar and holding multiple roadshows and public meetings daily. Even his wife has been active in door-to-door campaigns to woo women voters,” an AAP supporter in Jalandhar told ThePrint.
Now, a question arises: why does the Punjab chief minister need to camp in Jalandhar for an assembly bye-election?
According to Channi, Mann is “afraid of losing his chair”.
On Thursday, Channi told ThePrint, “He has already lost the parliamentary seat. Now, if he loses this too, he will lose the chief minister’s chair. His own party men are after his chair.”
He also expressed confidence that Surinder Kaur, Congress’s candidate from Jalandhar West, will win convincingly.
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Like Humpty Dumpty, nothing works for him: Jakhar
Asked what he thinks of Mann camping in Jalandhar ahead of the bypolls, Punjab BJP chief Sunil Jakhar compared Mann’s position to the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty: “All the king’s horses and all the kings me couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
He claimed that Mann had neglected not just the Doaba region, where Jalandhar is located, but all of Punjab during his tenure as CM, and now, “no amount of misuse of official machinery and force can help him win an assembly bye-election”.
He added: “His (Mann’s) claims ahead of the Lok Sabha polls that his party will win all 13 seats have already proved hollow, and his party has been reduced to 3 seats in the state. Now, he is losing Jalandhar West too. This is the reason he is panicking.”
The BJP leader alleged that the entire industrial belt of Punjab, which comprises Ludhiana, Jalandhar, and Phagwara, was in bad shape because of Mann’s apathetic attitude towards the problems of the industry and the common people.
“Forget about development, the condition of the roads, sanitation, water supply, and other infrastructure in the industrial areas of Punjab is so neglected that the industry is suffering badly in Punjab,” said Jakhar.
‘Nothing new, Jalandhar residence not just for polls’
Malwinder Singh Kang, AAP MP from Anandpur Sahib, told ThePrint that there was nothing new about a chief minister camping in an assembly segment for a bye-election. “During the 1995 Gidderbaha assembly bye-election, the then chief minister Beant Singh camped there throughout the campaign. Again, when the Adampur assembly seat in Punjab went for a bypoll in 1998, the then chief minister Parkash Singh Badal camped there.”
Kang, however, said that Mann shifting his residence to Jalandhar is not just for the purpose of assembly bye-election, but also because he would keep this as his second residence and camp office for the Doaba and Majha regions of Punjab for the rest of his tenure.
“People from the Majha and Doaba regions will not have to travel to Chandigarh for their day to day work. The chief minister will sit in his camp office at Jalandhar for at least 2 days a week,” Kang explained.
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The importance of the Jalandhar bypoll
In the 2022 Punjab assembly elections, the AAP won a record 92 out of 117 seats to form its government for the first time in the state.
Among the other parties, Congress could win just 18, SAD three, BJP two and BSP one. One seat went to an Independent.
AAP won 66 out of 69 seats in the Malwa region of Punjab, and 16 out of 25 in the Majha region. But its record was poor in the Doaba region comprising Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Hoshiarpur, and Shaheed Bhagat Singh (earlier called Nawanshahr) districts, where it could only win less than half of the total seats (nine out of 23).
The Majha region comprises Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Gurdaspur, and Pathankot districts while the Malwa region, the largest geographically, comprises Firozpur, Faridkot, Fazilka, Muktsar, Moga, Bathinda, Ludhiana, Barnala, Mansa, Sangrur, Patiala, Fatehgarh Sahib, Rupnagar (formerly Ropar), and Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar (formerly Mohali).
In Jalandhar district, AAP won four out of nine seats in the 2022 assembly elections, with the Congress winning the other five. The Jalandhar Parliamentary seat went to the Congress in 2019. However, after Congress MP Santosh Singh Chaudhary’s death in January 2023, the seat went from the Congress to AAP when Rinku, who was in AAP at that time, won the seat in a bye-election held in May that year.
However, the Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat went to the Congress again in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls when Channi (Congress) defeated BJP’s Rinku by 1.76 lakh votes.
AAP’s Pawan Kumar Tinu finished third in the election. Like the Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat, the Jalandhar assembly seat was also with AAP before March this year when Angural defected to the BJP.
Therefore, it is believed that Mann has made it a question of prestige to win this seat.
The second major reason could be the assembly-wise result of the Lok Sabha elections. When the AAP government was formed in 2022, it had a landslide victory. Two years later, in this year’s Lok Sabha elections, AAP could gain an edge in only 33 assembly seats. In terms of the assembly, AAP lost 59 seats in just two years.
Vote share fell by 16%, AAP finished third in Jalandhar West
In the 2022 assembly elections, when AAP won 92 seats, its vote share was 42 percent. In the Lok Sabha elections, this fell to 26 percent. The 16 percent decline in vote share has posed a threat to the government in Punjab and created a crisis for the party as well.
In the Jalandhar West assembly seat, AAP finished third in the Lok Sabha elections. Congress received the most votes there (44,394). The BJP came second with 42,827 votes, and AAP received only 15,629 votes. In this seat, AAP was behind Congress by 27,765 votes.
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
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