New Delhi: In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Punjab has stood out as one of the few states to have bucked the trend. The Congress is ahead on 8 of the 13 seats.
The Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP) was a junior partner in the alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) contesting 3 of the 13 states. The SAD contested the other 10.
The BJP is ahead in 2 seats – Hoshiyarpur and Gurdaspur – and the SAD leads in 2. The Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Bhagwant Maan is leading from Sangrur and is the only candidate of the AAP to be ahead.
Union Minister Harsimrat Badal is leading from the Bathinda constituency where she is up against the Congress’ Amarinder Raja Warring. Badal is ahead by a margin of 20 thousand votes.
BJP’s Sunny Deol is ahead by a margin of almost 40,000 votes. While Sukhbir Badal, former deputy chief minister, is leading by two lakh votes. Congress’ Manish Tewari has managed to win by a margin of forty thousand seats.
Going against the trend in most of north India, a muslim candidate, Mohammed Sadique of the Congress, is leading by a margin of nearly 80,000 votes in Faridkot. Interesingly, Faridkot has a negligible muslim population.
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In 2014 also Punjab had warded off the Modi wave when the BJP-SAD alliance won 5 of the 13 seats. The AAP won 4 and the Congress had won 4 with a vote share of 33%.
Since then the Congress swept the assembly elections in the state in 2017 under the leadership of Captain Amarinder Singh. The party won 77 of the 117 seats with a 38% vote share, while the SAD-BJP alliance registered wins in 18.
Anti-incumbency against the SAD-BJP regime which had ruled for 10 years went in favour of the Congress. Several analysts had predicted that the AAP would make significant inroads in the state but internal rifts within the party affected its prospects.
Now, the Congress has bettered its vote share in 2019 which has gone up to 40% while the SAD-BJP vote share is 37%. The AAP’s vote share has collapsed from 24% in 2014 and 23% in 2017 to 7% in 2019.
Factionalism within the AAP probably lead to its undoing. Things began to go south in 2015, when two of the four MP’s – Dharamvira Gandhi and Harinder Khalsa – challenged the central leadership and were subsequently suspended from the party.
On the other hand, Punjab perhaps holds a lesson for the Congress. Captain Amarinder Singh firmly has the reigns of the party in the state and has delivered electoral victories despite the Congress’ decimation in much of the country.