Constituency Watch: After defeats of heavyweights, BJP might field ex-diplomat Sandhu from Amritsar

Vishal Gulati

Amritsar, March 21 (IANS) After witnessing the embarrassing defeats of party stalwarts Arun Jaitley and Hardeep Singh Puri from the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat, which is traditionally a Congress bastion, the BJP is again set to field a former diplomat, Taranjit Singh Sandhu,, from the seat that is home to Sikhism’s holiest shrine, The Golden Temple. 

Former Indian ambassador to the US, Sandhu, a Sikh whose family has its roots here in one of Punjab’s high-profile constituencies, joined the saffron party on March 19.

After joining the BJP, Sandhu told the media that his focus will be helping his home city, Amritsar, to develop. “If the party feels that by contesting I can help in the development of Amritsar, I certainly will contest.”

From 1952 to 2019, 20 Lok Sabha polls and bypolls were held, and the Congress won 13 times, while others, including the Bharatiya Jan Sangh and the Janata Party, won six times and an Independent once.

The outgoing Member of Parliament is Gurjit Aujla, a Sikh and a local, who won the bypoll in 2017 with a margin of over 1.97 lakh votes. In 2019 he defeated diplomat-turned-politician Puri in a tough straight fight in the constituency dominated by the Jat community by 99,626 votes.

Incidentally, both Sandhu and Aujla are Jats. If Sandhu is fielded from Amritsar, he will break the ‘outsider’ tag, unlike Jaitley and Puri. Also he has shifted to his Green Avenue house here.

Sandhu, the second diplomat-turned-politician after Puri, has a rich family heritage. His grandfather Teja Singh Samundri was among the founders of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and his father Bishan Singh Samundri was the founding Vice-Chancellor of Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar.

His mother Jagjit Kaur was the principal of Government College for Women in Amritsar.

His grandfather quit the British army to join the Independence and gurdwara reforms movement. He died in his 40’s in Lahore Jail in 1926 under colonial custody.

Now, Samundri Hall in Sri Harmandir Sahib is named in his memory.

Before the announcement of his name as the BJP candidate, Sandhu has hit the streets of Amritsar. Often he’s seen interacting with the locals and savouring jalebis and gulab jamuns and saying he has a family connection with this city.

Welcome Sandhu’s joining the BJP, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, another diplomat who took the plunge into politics, wrote on X, “Our close association gives me fullest confidence that you will continue contributing to the nation’s development and progress.”

The state ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has fielded its minister Kuldeep Dhaliwal from Amritsar, who in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls got 20,087 votes, just 2.34 per cent of the total votes polled. The AAP is contesting the elections alone in Punjab without an alliance with the opposition's INDIA bloc.

Other parties have yet to declare their candidates.

However, local BJP leader Rajinder Mohan Singh Chhina, who unsuccessfully contested the 2017 bypoll, has opposed a ticket to any ‘outsider’ without naming Sandhu. “There is a big demand of the people of Amritsar that there should be a local candidate for the elections, who should be a resident of Amritsar, and understand the problems of the city. People don’t need the outsider, who comes here to contest the election and returns, never to come back,” he was quoted as saying.

In 2014, Capt Amarinder Singh, who is now with the BJP, had won this seat as a Congress candidate by a margin of more than a lakh votes by defeating Jaitley. At that time the SAD-BJP was in power in the state.

The Amritsar seat was represented by cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu from 2004 to 2014 when he was with the BJP. Sidhu is also a former cabinet minister in the previous Congress government in Punjab.

Capt Amarinder Singh, after his victory in Amritsar seat, led the Congress to a thumping victory in the Punjab elections in February 2017.

He quit as Amritsar MP before the Assembly polls and Aujla was fielded by the Congress for the by-election. He won by over 1.97 lakh votes, defeating the BJP and Aam Aadmi Party candidates in a triangular fight.

It is a Sikh majority constituency with more than 60 per cent voters.

For the Amritsar seat, there are 1,676 polling stations and a total of 15,93,846 voters, including 8,36,966 men, 7,56,820 women, and 60 transgenders.

Punjab’s 13 Lok Sabha seats go to the polls in a single phase on June 1.

During the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress-led UPA won the maximum -- eight seats -- in the state, while the BJP-led NDA managed to secure victory on four -- two each for BJP and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). The AAP was restricted to just one seat.

(Vishal Gulati can be reached at [email protected])

--IANS

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