Chandigarh: The BJP on Thursday secured a clean sweep in the Chandigarh mayoral polls, bagging all the top three posts – mayor, senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor - as the rival Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Congress chose to fight the elections separately.
While BJP councillor Saurabh Joshi was elected mayor, Jasmanpreet Singh and Suman Sharma were elected senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor, respectively.
The BJP has 18 councillors in 35-member MC House, AAP, 11 and the Congress has six and while the Chandigarh’s MP (Congress’ Manish Tiwari) also has an ex-officio vote; an AAP-Congress alliance would have tied the race at 18 votes each and in that case the election would have been done through toss of a coin, giving the latter, a chance to win.
For the mayor’s election while Joshi got 18 votes, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) got 11 votes and Congress secured seven votes (including one that of the party's MP). Congress, which fought only for mayor’s post, abstained for the remaining two posts.
Joshi, a second-generation RSS Swayamsevak and a longtime BJP activist, is a law graduate from Panjab University and had been a student leader.
Notably, it was first time since the establishment of Chandigarh Municipal Corporation (MC) in 1996, that the election was done via show of hands and not by secret ballot, apparently a fallout of the infamous 2024 controversy in which the then presiding officer Anil Masih was caught on camera tampering with votes to declare a BJP candidate as the mayor.
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However, it was the Supreme Court which overturned the BJP’s win and declared AAP’s candidate Yogesh Dhingra as the mayor.
The councillors, thus, this time showed their choices and also signed after their votes.
The results apparently showed that it was because of the failure of the AAP and Congress to have truck to challenge BJP. Pertinently, though the two parties had plans to have alliance till around 2024 Lok Sabha elections to fight BJP, conflicts within and between AAP and Congress over various issues led to their breakup.
