In Punjab’s Gurdaspur and Amritsar, BJP makes big gains in urban areas, suffers losses in rural belts
BJP candidates Dinesh Singh Babbu and Taranjit Singh Sandhu failed to win over rural voters in the Lok Sabha constituencies of Gurdaspur and Amritsar, respectively.
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Taranjit Singh Sandhu’s meeting with Damdami Taksal Head Harnam Singh Dhuma, successor of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, during his election campaign couldn’t provide him much relief in the rural areas. (Express Photo)The Lok Sabha election results from two constituencies in Punjab, Gurdaspur and Amritsar, reveal that the BJP, cashing in on the Ram temple sentiment, managed to woo the urban voter – only to be decimated in the rural belts.
In Gurdaspur, BJP’s Dinesh Singh Babbu lost to Congress’s Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa by a margin of more than 82,000 votes. Though the BJP made heavy gains in the urban areas of the constituency and the Hindu belt in Pathankot district, it was routed in the rural belt.
The Gurdaspur parliamentary constituency is divided into three population segments. While a majority of voters in Pathankot district are Hindus, the villages in Gurdaspur have a Sikh majority and cities like Gurdaspur and Batala have a mixed population. The Gurdaspur Lok Sabha seat comprises nine Assembly seats.
On Tuesday, Babbu maintained the highest lead of 26,781 votes in Sujanpur, 21,454 in Pathankot and 12,816 in Boha, three Assembly seats in Pathankot district. The BJP had lost Sujanpur and Boha in the 2022 Assembly elections and only won Pathankot with a margin of 7,000 votes.
But the BJP witnessed a meltdown in the rural segment of Gurdaspur where Babbu could only get 5,981 and 6,973 votes from Dera Baba Nanak and Fatehgarh Churian, respectively. These were the two constituencies that swung the election in favour of Congress candidate and former deputy chief minister Randhawa, the sitting MP from Dera Baba Nanak.
Randhawa won six out of the nine Assembly constituencies even as Babbu failed to put up a fight in the semi-urban constituencies of Batala and Gurdaspur.
Babbu had campaigned extensively reminding voters that it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had constructed the Ram temple in Ayodhya. He had also tried to defuse the anger against the BJP in the rural belt by telling protesting farmers that their demands were genuine but the attempt seems to have failed.
A similar story played out in Amritsar where BJP’s Sikh candidate, former Indian ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu, lost to Congress’s Gurjeet Singh Aujla, who secured 2,55,181 votes. Sandhu came third, after Aam Aadmi Party’s Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal.
Sandhu won handsomely from the Hindu-majority Amritsar North and Amritsar Central seats with 18,684 and 10,694 votes, respectively. He also had a slight edge in the Amritsar East seat, which has a mixed population.
However, the gains were not replicated in the rural areas. Sandhu was expected to perform better in the Ajnala and Attari Assembly constituencies. In the 2022 Assembly elections, the BJP had secured more than 2,500 votes in Attari, a reserved seat, after the party made inroads among the Majhabi Sikhs, a Dalit community. Two years later, Sandhu only managed to get a little more than 13,000 votes from Attari.
Amarpal Singh Bony, who switched to the BJP from Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal), campaigned for Sandhu in Ajnala. In the 2022 elections, Bony had finished second in this seat with more than 35,000 votes in his kitty. But Sandhu only got 14,404 votes from Ajnala. Sandhu bagged more than 11,000 votes from Raja Sansi. However, these numbers from the rural Assembly segments were not enough to help Sandhu secure a win in Amritsar.
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