CHANDIGARH: The ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) announced its candidates for the by-elections to the four assembly seats in Punjab scheduled to be held on November 13.
AAP has fielded Hardeep Singh Dimpy Dhillon, who joined the party after quitting the Shiromani Akali Dal in August, from the Gidderbaha constituency.
Ishaan Chabbewal, son of AAP Hoshiarpur MP Raj Kumar Chabbewal, has been named as the candidate for the Chabbewal (SC) segment. Harinder Singh Dhaliwal, close confidant of Sangrur MP Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer, will represent the party from Barnala. Gurdeep Singh Randhawa will contest from the Dera Baba Nanak seat.
The bypolls were necessitated after MLAs representing the four constituencies were elected to the Lok Sabha. Amrinder Singh Raja Warring, the Congress MLA from Gidderbaha, won the Ludhiana Lok Sabha seat. Raj Kumar Chabbewal, a former Congress MLA who later joined the AAP, was elected to the Lok Sabha from Hoshiarpur.
Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, the Congress MLA from Dera Baba Nanak, won the Gurdaspur parliamentary seat, and Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer, the AAP MLA from Barnala, was elected from Sangrur.
The Aam Aadmi Party today released its list of candidates for the upcoming by-elections to four assembly constituencies.
Raj Kumar Chabbewal who was earlier in Congress and resigned from the party ahead of the Lok Sabha elections and joined the AAP. He was then the sitting MLA of Congress from Chabbewal. After getting the AAP ticket he fought the parliamentary polls from Hoshiarpur (reserved seat) and won. Now his son Ishaan will be fighting from his father assembly segment.
56-year-old Hardeep Singh, alias Dimpy Dhillon, is the party’s candidate from Gidderbaha. He recently quit the Shiromani Akali Dal as he was a close aide of SAD chief Sukhbir Singh Badal and joined AAP on August 28 this year. He was brought into the party fold by state president and Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann.
He has unsuccessfully contested two assembly elections on the SAD ticket against Punjab Congress president Amrinder Singh Raja Warring from Gidderbaha in 2017 and 2022. He had also served as chairman of the District Planning Committee in Muktsar during the then SAD-BJP government. Singh still publicly states that Sukhbir was the one who brought him into politics.
Harinder Singh Dhaliwal who has been fielded from Barnala, considered a close aide of Sangrur MP Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer. Meet was earlier the sitting MLA of the party from this seat and also the cabinet minister in the Mann Government. However, the party told him to contest the recent Lok Sabha elections from Sangrur and he won the polls from there, leaving the Barnala seat vacant.
While Gurdeep Singh Randhawa is party’s candidate from Dera Baba Nanak assembly segment, he is also the party’s constituency in-charge of Dera Baba Nanak. For the ruling party to win these by elections is very crucial thus campaign and poll strategy are being micromanaged by the party's top brass. The party won the recent Jalandhar-West bypoll by huge margin. But it could only win three seats in the recent lok sabha polls thus poor performance.