Jalandhar bypoll: 4 Assembly constituencies powered AAP’s win, a village kept its promise

AAP candidate Sushil Rinku got 435 out of the 595 votes polled in the Seechewal village. He got 1,47,906 votes from the Phillaur, Kartarpur, Jalandhar West and Shahkot Assembly segments. He got a lead of 27,421 votes from these four segments alone.

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AAP's Sushil Kumar Rinku celebrates his Jalandhar bypoll win with his supporters. (PTI)

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Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate Sushil Rinku got 49 per cent of the total votes polled in favour of him (3,02,279) in the bypoll to Jalandhar Lok Sabha from four of the nine Assembly constituencies. Rinku won with a massive margin of 58,691 votes Saturday.

Rinku got 1,47,906 votes from the Phillaur, Kartarpur, Jalandhar West and Shahkot Assembly segments. He got a lead of 27,421 votes from these four segments alone, which itself was 8,000 more than the winning margin of 19,000 on this seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

In the Kartarpur constituency, his lead was 10,682 votes, while the total number of votes polled in his favour was 37,951. Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) came second in this constituency with 27,269 votes.

At Jalandhar West, which is his own constituency and from where he was elected MLA in 2017 on a Congress ticket but then lost in 2022, his lead was 9,467. He got 35,288 votes, while the Congress, which came second here, got 25,821 votes.

In Phillaur, which is represented by a Congress MLA and son of the Congress candidate Karamjit Kaur Chaudhary, Rinku registered a lead of 6,999 by getting 38,657 votes. The Congress got 31,658 votes here.

Similarly, in Shahkot, which remained with the SAD for two decades and until the Congress breached the citadel, Rinku got 36,010 votes, followed by the Congress candidate, who got 35,737 votes. In the 2022 Assembly elections in Shahkot, the Congress’s victory margin was 12,067 votes.

Recently ahead of the elections, nearly half a dozen villages, including Seechewal in the Shahkot constituency, have decided to vote in favour of the AAP for sending environmentalist Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal to Rajya Sabha. The result here showed that out of 595 votes polled in this village, 435 were for the AAP. The Congress got 90 votes and the SAD 70.

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On May 7, a day before the end of the election campaign, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his Punjab counterpart Bhagwant Man visited Baba Seechewal at his place Nirmal Kutia in village Seechewal.

Several leaders think the AAP has broken into the strongholds of traditional parties, and now they need to rethink their working styles to win over the people.