Amritsar LS bypoll: Record win for Aujla

GS Paul

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, March 11

Congress candidate Gurjeet Singh Aujla today won the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat beating his closest BJP rival by record 1,99,189 votes. The polling was held on February 4 after Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee chief Captain Amarinder Singh vacated the seat in protest against the Supreme Court verdict on the SYL Canal water sharing agreement.

Aujla polled 5,08,153 votes, while BJP’s Rajinder Mohan Singh Chhina got 3,08,964 and AAP’s Upkar Singh Sandhu 1,49,984. CPI’s Daswinder Kaur finished fourth with 17,886 votes, while APP’s contender Gurinder Singh Bajwa got 5,542 votes.

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Aujla, who had campaigned for Capt Amarinder during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, has been the DCC (rural) president since 2013. He was appointed vice-president of the Amritsar District Youth Congress in 1997, elected to the Amritsar Municipal Corporation in 2007. He was later appointed secretary of the PPCC.

Hitting out at the SAD-BJP combine, Aujla said he would try to create job opportunities by seeking a special economic package. “I never took my opponents as a competition. I express gratitude to the residents for reposing faith in me,” he said.

The seat has traditionally been a Congress bastion from the times of Gurmukh Singh Musafir and then Raghunandan Lal Bhatia. Navjot Singh Sidhu, as a BJP candidate, ended the dominance when he trounced six-time parliamentarian Bhatia in the 2004 elections. The seat remained with Sidhu till 2014 when he made way for Arun Jaitley, who went on to lose to Capt Amarinder.