Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is currently in power in Punjab, may face a setback as opinion polls have predicted just one seat for the party in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections against 15 seats. Percentage vote share.
Congress is expected to win seven seats with 38 per cent vote share, while NDA is expected to win three seats.
Punjab is set for a multi-cornered contest this year as AAP has decided to contest the elections alone, like the Congress, despite partnering under the Indian umbrella. Meanwhile, the BJP will also contest the elections alone without the SAD, which has decided to walk away from the NDA in 2023.
Punjab ranks 16th in the list of states with the highest number of Lok Sabha seats among Indian states. It has a total of 13 Lok Sabha seats – Anandpur Sahib, Firozpur, Khadur Sahib, Hoshiarpur, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Fatehgarh Sahib, Gurdaspur, Bathinda, Sangrur, Patiala, Jalandhar and Faridkot – of which four are reserved for Scheduled Caste candidates.
What happened in 2019?
The Congress’ vote share in Punjab increased to 40 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, in which it won eight of the total 13 parliamentary seats in the state.
The vote share of the Aam Aadmi Party, which managed to win just one seat, declined from 24 percent in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections to 7.38 percent in the 2019 elections.
Shiromani Akali Dal’s vote share increased to 27.45 per cent, even though the party had won only two of the 10 seats – Ferozepur and Bathinda. According to Election Commission data, the vote share of BJP, which won in Hoshiarpur and Gurdaspur, also saw an increase of 9.63 percent.
Another surprise in the elections was that Bahujan Samaj Party got 3.49 percent votes in the poll. BSP candidates contesting from Anandpur Sahib, Hoshiarpur and Jalandhar constituencies managed to get more than one lakh votes in each constituency.
The Congress won a landslide victory, winning eight out of 13 parliamentary constituencies and bucking the pro-Narendra Modi trend, surprising both the Akali-BJP alliance and the Aam Aadmi Party, which won four and one seats respectively.
The Land of Five Rivers is no stranger to ‘coups’. On September 18, 2021, the then Chief Minister of Punjab Captain Amarinder Singh resigned due to differences with other Congress members and Charanjit Singh Channi succeeded him.
A month later, Singh announced that he would form a new party to contest the elections. He officially resigned from the Congress on November 2, 2021 and founded a new political party called Punjab Lok Congress.
On January 18, 2022, AAP announced Bhagwant Mann as its chief ministerial candidate for the assembly elections.
Legislative Assembly elections were held in Punjab on February 20, 2022, to elect 117 members of the 16th Assembly.
The Aam Aadmi Party won 92 out of 117 seats and secured a strong majority of 79 percent and Mann took oath as the Chief Minister.