Turncoats, aggressive campaigns made Jalandhar West bypoll a cakewalk for AAP

Aakanksha N Bhardwaj

Jalandhar, July 14

The Aam Aadmi Party has secured a convincing win in the Jalandhar West bypoll with Mohinder Bhagat becoming an MLA from the constituency.

While the high command dedicated itself entirely to the constituency and Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann has started living here with the family, party men had worked a lot on the ground and adopted every strategy to make the party win.

The party left no chance to woo voters. While the state leadership was making its presence felt through roadshows, local leaders were aggressively holding door-to-door campaigns and meetings to establish a personal connect with the electorate to convince them to press the button of their symbol on the D-day.

One of the strategies was to get councillors from other parties to make the base strong in AAP. In the last week before the bypoll, Jagdish Samrai and Kamaljit of the BJP and Onkar Tikka of the Congress joined AAP. Considered the Congress loyalist, Jagdish Samrai, a former councillor from Ward No. 78, had first joined the BJP and then AAP. He changed the party within a month.

“Those who left their own parties and joined AAP were given several assurances for future,” a source from the party added. Samrai said the door-to-door campaign was being launched on a daily basis. “Such campaigning was never witnessed before,” he claimed.

Nirmal Singh Nimma, another party leader, said the support for AAP started when senior leader Pawan Tinu resolved the issue of Hadda Rori (where animals are skinned) in the Buta Mandi area of the Jalandhar West constituency. “He has a great contribution to making the party win,” Nimma said.