Chandigarh: It was the internal bickering within the Congress which did the party’s Ludhiana West bypoll nominee Bharat Bhushan Ashu – a former minister and a two-time legislator – in.
Throughout his campaign trails, his differences with the state leadership were visible for Ashu, 51, who led an aggressive campaign and who was being seen as a strong face in the fray against AAP’s nominee Sanjeev Arora, 61, who defeated him by over 10,000 votes on Monday.
While his rival Arora had chief minister Bhagwant Mann and top AAP leaders from Delhi, BJP’s Jiwan Gupta had several national leaders from Delhi and neighbouring Haryana, running aggressive campaigns for the nominees of their respective parties, Ashu had none.
Notably, Congress state chief Amarinder Singh Raja Warring and Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Partap Singh Bajwa remained conspicuous for their absence during Ashu’s campaign trails, nor did he have party’s top leaders from Centre.
However, both Warring and Bajwa issued statements backing him in assailing the ruling AAP government on the issue of vigilance bureau’s summons to him.
Ashu was arrested when the AAP came to power in 2022 in an alleged food-grains scam; he remained in jail for about two years till the Punjab and Haryana High Court quashed the FIRs registered against him, terming them “pure vendetta’’. However, the AAP government on June 6 last suspended Jagatpreet Singh, the senior superintendent of police (SSP), Vigilance Bureau (VB), Ludhiana, for issuing summons to Ashu in connection with a five-month old school land misuse case suspecting that the same would get Ashu political sympathy in the bypoll.
However, Ashu did have former chief minister Charanjit Singh Chani and MLAs Pargat Singh and Rana Gurjeet in his campaigns. Even, AICC Punjab state affairs incharge Bhupesh Baghel, accompanied him only on the day he filed his nomination papers and then on a day before campaigning ended.
Ashu who got 24,542 votes this time, had polled about 32,000 votes in 2022 assembly election when he was defeated by AAP’s Gurpreet Bassi Gogi, whose death in January this year, necessitated this bypoll.
