Amritsar, May 25
In the keenly contested Amritsar (West) byelection, Akali-BJP candidate Inderbir Singh Bularia today won with a comfortable margin of 22,233 votes by defeating his nearest Congress rival Navdeep Singh Goldy.
The security deposits of other two candidates, including Bhai Ram Singh, secretary-general of the SAD (Amritsar), and Sharnjit Singh, an Independent, who polled 1,161 and 363 votes, respectively, were forfeited.
As per the final figures given by returning officer Vimal Setia, out of 1,32,121 of the constituency, 66,251 votes were polled. Bularia polled 43,495 votes while Goldy got only 21,262 votes.
The stakes were high. Hence presidents of three major political parties, Sukhbir Singh Badal of the SAD, Rajinder Kaur Bhattal of the PPCC and Simranjit Singh Mann of the SAD (A), spearheaded the election campaign of their candidates.
Former Congress MLA Harjinder Singh Thekedar, who has been expelled from the party for six years for his anti-party activities, has sought resignation of Bhattal owning the moral responsibility of Congress defeat.
Meanwhile, Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and public relations minister Bikram Singh Majithia thanked the voters for giving the SAD-BJP alliance an “even more emphatic mandate than the one given in February, 2007”.
The Chief Minister claimed that there had been a significant improvement in the percentage of votes polled in favour of the SAD candidate over the last polling result. While the SAD had polled 62.5 per cent votes then (87,392), this time the ruling party’s chunk increased to 65.5 per cent (66,281).
Mann said: “For us it is not whether we won or lost. We are proud that we participated in a constituency where the electorate sends a representative to the Punjab Assembly from Darbar Sahib, the holiest shrine of Sikhism”.
