Congress bags 4 of 5 seats in Una district, 3 new faces elected

Una, December 9

The Congress won four of the five Assembly seats in Una district. Three new faces — Sudarshan Kumar Babloo from Chintpurni (SC) segment and Davinder Kumar Bhutto from Kutlehar segment — will represent their constituencies in the Vidhan Sabha, along with Leader of the Opposition Mukesh Agnihotri, who won from the Haroli seat.

The BJP won only the Una seat; Satpal Singh Satti defeated sitting Congress MLA Satpal Raizada by a small margin of 1,736 votes.

In a huge upset, Rural Development Minister Virender Kanwar lost to Congress candidate Davinder Kumar Bhutto from the Kutlehar seat by a margin of 7,579 votes. Bhutto has held various posts in the Panchayati Raj Institutions, including the Chairman of the Bangana Panchayat Samiti. Bhutto gained advantage of the strong anti-incumbency against the ruling party as the BJP candidates had been winning this Assembly segment for the last three decades.

In Chintpurni, BJP sitting MLA Balbir Singh lost to Congress candidate Sudarshan Singh Babloo by a margin of 4,858 votes. Babloo is the state president of Congress Sewa Dal Young Brigade. The Congress high command had preferred his name over former Minister Kuldip Kumar.

In Gagret, Congress candidate Chaitanya Sharma defeated sitting BJP MLA Rajesh Thakur by a huge margin of 15,685 votes. Sharma, a sitting zila parishad member, is 28-year-old and is a law graduate. His father is a former bureaucrat, who also served as Uttarakhand Chief Secretary.

Agnihotri defeated BJP’s Ram Kumar by a margin of 9,148 votes from Haroli, winning the seat for the fifth time.

Meanwhile, AAP registered a dismal performance in all Assembly segments; the party got only 2,833 votes in the five seats. The BSP got only 1,288 votes in all five constituencies while 1,546 voters pressed the NOTA button.

Two EVMs, one each from Una and Kutlehar, reportedly malfunctioned and the counting at these booths was done on the basis of polling slips of VVPAT machines.