Despite emerging as the largest party in the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation (MC) polls, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Saturday lost the mayoral election to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by one vote.
The BJP candidate for the post of Chandigarh Mayor won the election by bagging 14 votes against AAP candidate Anju Katyal who got 13 votes. Both the BJP and the AAP had 14 votes each in the House but one vote was declared invalid.
Helping the BJP candidate’s victory, seven councillors of the Congress and the lone member of the Shiromani Akali Dal in the 35-member House abstained from voting in the mayoral election.
Kaur, a councillor from ward number six is the wife of Jagtar Singh Dhillon, a former councillor and lives in Mani Majra. She has studied till BA second year. She entered politics after her husband’s ward was reserved for a woman candidate.
BJP’s Dalip Sharma won the senior deputy mayor election, defeating AAP’s Prem Lata. Sharma got 15 votes and Lata 13 out of the 28 votes cast.
BJP candidate Anup Gupta won the deputy mayor’s election. He was
declared the winner by draw of lots. Earlier, Gupta and Ram Chander
Yadav of the AAP were tied with 14 votes each in the House with a
strength of 28 members. The Congress and the SAD abstained from this
election as well.
In the December 24 election, the AAP bagged 14 seats, BJP 12 seats, Congress eight and the SAD one seat. The number of BJP votes in the
House has gone up to 14 as Harpreet Kaur Babla, the wife of former Chandigarh Congress vice-president, Devinder Babla, joined the BJP. Another vote it has is of city MP Kirron Kher.
Soon after the declaration of the result, ruckus broke out at the House as AAP councillors resorted to sloganeering. AAP councillors sat next to the newly-elected mayor and did not allow deputy commissioner Vinay Pratap to move, stalling the election process of the post of senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor.
Congress had already opted out of the election by not fielding any candidate and all seven councillors abstained from the voting process. They were joined by the lone Akali Dal councillor, Hardeep Singh.