Congress’ Jakhar wins Gurdaspur bypoll by over 1.9 lakh votes

TIL Desk/National/Punjab/ The Congress on Sunday wrested the Gurdaspur Lok Sabha seat from the Bharatiya Janata Party with its Punjab unit chief Sunil Jakhar trouncing saffron party candidate Swaran Salaria by a whopping margin of 1,93,219 votes in the high-stakes bypoll.

Jakhar polled 4,99,752 votes, way ahead of the BJP candidate’s 3,06,533, while the Aam Aadmi Party candidate Major General Suresh Khajuria (retd) finished a distant third, garnering a mere 23,579 votes. Khajuria lost his security deposit.

Jakhar maintained the lead in all nine assembly segments, right from start of the counting of votes at 8 am, in a contest that virtually turned out to be a direct fight between the Congress and the BJP.

Polling for the Gurdaspur seat, which had fallen vacant after the death of BJP MP Vinod Khanna in April this year, was held on October 11.

After the Congress’s landslide win, it was early Diwali for party workers who distributed sweets. Celebratory scenes were witnessed at the party’s offices at Chandigarh, Patiala, Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar apart from several places in Gurdaspur.