The Sangrur parliamentary seat was vacated by Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann after he won the state assembly elections on March 10 from Dhuri assembly segment and resigned from the MP post later on. Now the Lok Sabha by-poll is to be held in Sangrur.
As per the Election Commission’s announcement, the by-election will be held on June 23 and the counting of votes will be held on June 26. The gazette notification for the by-election will be issued on May 30 and the last date for filing of nominations by a candidate is June 6. Scrutiny of nominations will be held on June 7 and the last date for withdrawal of candidature is June 9. With this, the model code of conduct shall come into force with immediate effect in the entire Sangrur Lok Sabha constituency. The published electoral rolls for the state assembly elections with respect to January 1, 2022 will be used for the Lok Sabha by-poll. The ECI has decided to use EVMs and VVPATs in the bye-poll in all the polling stations.
Apart from Punjab, the two other Lok Sabha seats where the by-elections will be held, are Azamgarh and Rampur in UP – which were recently vacated by Samajwadi Party leaders Akhilesh Yadav and Mohd Azam Khan, respectively, after winning the Assembly elections. While there are a total of 7 assembly seats where the by-elections would be held, including Rajinder Nagar in Delhi, Mandar in Jharkhand, Atmakur in Andhra Pradesh, and Agartala, Town Bordowali, Surma and Jubarajnagar in Tripura. The Rajinder Nagar seat was vacated by Raghav Chadha of the AAP who became a Rajya Sabha member from Punjab recently.
With this, the political temperature in all these seatea has started rising. In Punjab, it will be a five cornered fight between Congress, Akali Dal, BJP, AAP, and Akali Dal (Amritsar) in Sangrur Lok Sabha seat, whereas in UP, the main fight is predicted to be between the Samajwadi Party and the BJP. In next few months, the assembly elections are to be held in Gujarat and Himachal, so these by-elections can be considered as a litmus test for the ruling party BJP, though the conditions in by-elections and several state elections are always different.
The political analysts are having a keen eye on Delhi’s Rajinder Nagar assembly seat where the elections will be held as AAP’s Raghav Chadha has resigned as he’s nominated to Rajya Sabha. This seat was once considered a stronghold for BJP, so it’ll be an interesting electoral battle between the BJP and the AAP.
