New Delhi: Actor and sitting Chandigarh MP Kirron Kher appears all set to once again win the seat by defeating Congress stalwart and four-time MP Pawan Kumar Bansal. By 6 pm, Kher had extended her lead to 27,913 votes.
Kher, who had won the seat by a margin of 69,642 votes in 2014, polled 171,010 votes or 49.62% of the total votes while Bansal got 41.52%.
The actor-politician had contested the election on the performance of the Modi government and her own “clean” image. She also spoke about issues like national security and development during her campaign but tried to keep it focussed around Modi so that not too many questions were asked of her own performance.
Chandigarh has its own unique place in Indian politics as it is the common capital of Haryana and Punjab and also a union territory and thereby houses a large number of officials from the region. Traditionally, the seat has witnessed a direct fight between the Congress and the BJP for the last three decades. This time too the two parties battled it out to wrest control over this union territory.
The contest in 2014 was three cornered both figuratively and in intensity. It had also featured actor-politician Gul Panag of the Aam Aadmi Party, who had secured 1.08 lakh votes. This time, AAP, which first waited for an alliance with Congress in Chandigarh too along with Delhi and Haryana, fielded a strong candidate in Harmohan Dhawan. He had won the seat as a Janata Dal candidate in 1989. Though he did not contest the 2014 poll, in the previous 2009 election Dhawan contested as a BSP candidate had secured over 61,000 votes.
However, this time Dhawan was not able to draw the voters. He managed to poll only 10,419 votes by 6 pm. This amounted to a little over 3% of the votes polled.
Traditionally, Congress has enjoyed an edge of the seat winning it seven of the 13 times. This time it fielded Bansal in the hope that he would be able to repeat his past magic and topple Kher. With Panag not contesting and AAP appearing somewhat in a disarray, the Congress was hoping that the anti-BJP vote would not get split to the extent it did last time.
Bahujan Samaj Party has been consistently fighting the seat for the last two decades and been getting around 3% votes, too could not make much of an impact. Its candidate Parveen Kumar polled 5,408 votes amounting to 1.57% of the votes polled by this evening.