Punjab: Parliamentary elections
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2014
Jaitley bowled out by Captain, AAP stuns Punjab with 4 wins
Rohan Dua
Chandigarh:
TNN The Times of India May 17 2014
By winning four out of the 13 Lok Sabha seats in Punjab on Friday , the debutant Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) not only scuttled the Modi wave in the state but also redefined its political equations.
While the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) held on to its 2009 tally of four seats, Congres was reduced from eight to just three seats, thanks to the AAP effect. While Congres's vote share in the state was 33% and SAD got 26.4%, AAP took away 24.5%. Punjab CM Parkash Badal had compared AAP to leprosy in April.
All Congres big guns -Ambika Soni in Anandpur Sahib, Sunil Jakhar in Ferozepur and state chief Partap Bajwa in Gurdaspur -lost their seats. But amid the rubble stood Captain Amarinder Singh who left BJP redfaced by defeating Arun Jaitley by a hefty margin of 1,05,175 votes. He is the only Congres candidate to have defeated a top BJP leader in the country .
The Jaitley defeat is significant because SAD had projected him as a possible deputy PM or finance minister who would fix Punjab's financial woes.
Captain's wife and Union minister, Preneet Kaur, was seen as a sure-shot winner but she lost to AAP's Dr Dharamvira Gandhi in Patiala. Badal bahu Harsimrat Kaur barely managed to defeat family rebel and PPP-Congres candidate Manpreet Badal by 19,395 votes.
The biggest win margin of 2,11,721 went to Sangrur satirist and AAP candidate Bhagwant Mann.
