Batra declared winner after 6 hours

Congress candidate Bharat Bhushan Batra had to wait for getting his victory certificate for nearly six hours on Tuesday as three other candidates in the fray, including BJP’s Manish Grover, moved applications requesting the Returning Officer to match VVPAT of five booths with the results of their EVMs.

Supporters of both — Batra and Grover— in considerable number reached outside the counting centre as soon as they came to know about it. The authorities took a long time to reject the applications and declare Batra the winner. At around 10.30 pm, Batra took out victory procession from the counting centre to his office near Canal Rest House. Batra has joined the club of those veteran leaders, who have been elected legislator from Rohtak either thrice or more than that.

Earlier, former Deputy Chief Minister of Haryana and the BJP veteran leader late Mangal Sain served as MLA from Rohtak for record seven times while former minister Seth Shri Kishan Dass was elected MLA three times from here.

Batra, a close aide of former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, is a second generation politician whose father Satram Dass Batra had also been an MLA twice from the Kalanaur constituency in 1968 and 1972. He also contested the election from Rohtak as the Congress nominee in 1982 but lost to the BJP’s Mangal Sain by a narrow margin of 380 votes.

Bharat Bhushan was practising as an advocate in a Rohtak court and has risen to become a three-time MLA. Before entering politics for the first time in the 2009 Assembly polls, he served as the Chairperson of the Haryana Public Service Commission (HPSC) during the then Congress government led by Hooda.

He emerged victorious in his debut election in 2009 by a margin of 19,595 votes and defeated BJP’s Manish Kumar Grover.