The fight is between the four-time former lawmaker and Congress candidate Pawan Kumar Bansal and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) sitting member of Parliament Kirron Kher. Even the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is not behind which has fielded Harmohan Dhawan
New Delhi: It is a tough triangular fight in the joint capital city of Punjab and Haryana – Chandigarh which went for a poll on May 19 in the seventh and the last phase of the Lok Sabha election.
The fight is between the four-time former lawmaker and Congress candidate Pawan Kumar Bansal and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) sitting member of Parliament Kirron Kher. Even the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is not behind which has fielded Harmohan Dhawan.
BJP and Congress have renominated their 2014 candidates for Lok Sabha Elections 2019, AAP has replaced Gul Panag with Harmohan Dhawan, who joined AAP in November 2018.
Despite Pawan Bansal’s formidable record, the Congress lost to the BJP in 2014 amid a Modi wave. In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Bansal could get only 13,000 more votes than the AAP’s Gul Panag, who was placed third. The AAP candidate ate into Bansal’s traditional vote bank in the rehabilitated colonies and slums as she touched 1.08 lakh votes to Bansal’s 1.21 lakh.
This time around too, the AAP’s Harmohan Dhawan is hoping to better his party’s performance of 2014 against the odds. The AAP is a fraction of itself since the last elections. It has lost a major chunk of its cadre, and its organisation weakened because of splits at the local and national level.
In 2014 elections, Kher defeated Bansal by securing 42.20 per cent votes. At the time of the previous Lok Sabha elections in 2014, Chandigarh had 615,214 registered electors – 333,621 of them male and 281,593 female. The constituency had seen a 73.71% voter turnout in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
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