There is a buzz in Punjab’s political circles that former Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Jalandhar, Rajinder Singh, who joined the BJP Saturday in the presence of Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, may be fielded by the party for the May 10 by-election to the Jalandhar Lok Sabha constituency. This has caused worry among some BJP ticket aspirants for the Jalandhar bypoll, which include Rajesh Bagha, former chairman of Punjab Schedule Caste (SC) Commission, among others. The bypoll is set to witness a four-cornered contest between the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the principal Opposition Congress, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and BJP. In the final analysis the battle is mainly expected to involve the two principal contenders, the AAP and Congress, for whom it is especially going to be crucial. The Jalandhar parliamentary seat has been a Congress stronghold since 1952, with the party not losing any election here since 1999. The bypoll was necessitated after the sitting Congress MP Santokh Singh Chaudhary passed away due to cardiac arrest during the Jalandhar leg of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra in January while he was participating in it. Looking to retain the seat, the Congress is mainly banking on the “sympathy factor” due to Chaudhary’s demise, fielding his wife Karamjit Kaur for the bypoll. It is a prestige battle for the grand old party. None of the other three major parties has announced its candidate so far. Rajinder Singh served in the Punjab Police for 40 years. He joined it as an assistant sub-inspector in 1980 at the age of 20, and rose through the ranks to senior positions including Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) in Kapurthala district. He retired in 2020. The recipient of President’s medal three times for his meritorious services, he was known as a soft-spoken cop. He served his entire tenure as an officer in the Doaba region, especially in Jalandhar. Sources said that the BJP may give ticket to Rajinder for the Jalandhar bypoll as the party has been looking for a new face. The party has been targeting the Bhagwant Mann-led AAP government over its alleged failures on the law and order front, raising issues like the killings of a kabbadi player and a businessman besides drug mafia and extortion calls to businessmen to hit out at the AAP dispensation. Rajinder’s credentials as a police officer may come in handy for the saffron party’s law and order plank if it fields him. Talking to The Indian Express, Rajinder said that he has joined the BJP without any conditions, claiming that “My only aim is to serve the people”. “During my service, I used to have a lot of interactions with public and the same is the nature of work of any politician. I don’t find much difference between the works of a cop and a politician. So I decided to join politics,” he said. When he joined the BJP, almost all the senior state party leaders were present at the function, including Union minister Som Prakash and state party president Ashwini Sharma. The stakes are high for the AAP in the Jalandhar bypoll, as the party had suffered a stunning defeat in the by-election to the Sangrur Lok Sabha constituency, CM Mann’s home turf, in June last year, barely three months after it swept the state Assembly polls. Mann has been making frequent visits to Jalandhar for the past two months to in a bid to boost his party’s prospects. The AAP is however still searching for a candidate for the bypoll. The Sukhbir Badal-led SAD, which has already campaigned extensively in more than half of the total nine Assembly segments of the Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat in the past two months, is also yet to announce its candidate. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Santokh Singh Chaudhary had garnered 3, 85,721 votes (37.90%), defeating the SAD candidate Charanjit Singh Atwal, who got 3, 66, 221 votes (35.90%). The BJP was then part of the SAD-led alliance. APP candidate Justice (retired) Jora Singh could then get just 25,467 votes (2.50%). In the 2022 Punjab elections, when the BJP fought along with some smaller parties like the Punjab Lok Congress — floated by Capt Amarinder Singh who later joined the saffron party — after severing its decades-old ties with the SAD, the party could not win a single seat out of six Assembly seats it contested in the Jalandhar parliamentary constituency. It had won from three seats — Jalandhar Central, Jalandhar North and Jalandhar West — in the 2007 and 2012 polls, which it had then got from its senior ally SAD under their seat-sharing formula. For both the erstwhile allies, the Jalandhar bypoll would be a fresh litmus test to gauge their individual electoral strength in the state.
