Confident of Congress ticket: Bansal

Ramkrishan Upadhyay
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, January 30

After Dr Navjot Kaur Sidhu, former Union Minister Manish Tewari and two others, former Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal has sought the Congress ticket for the Chandigarh Lok Sabha seat. Bansal’s supporters put up a big show by thronging the Congress Bhawan in Sector 35 where he submitted his application to the city Congress president expressing his desire to contest the seat on the party ticket.

Amid shouting of slogans in his favour, Bansal reached the city Congress office in the afternoon and formally gave his application to the local Congress chief, Pardeep Chhabra.

Bansal said though a resolution by the Chandigarh Congress had already been passed in his favour, he gave the application to make it clear that he wanted to contest the LS election only from Chandigarh.

On a question of being offered the Rajya Sabha ticket by the party, Bansal said he was not interested in a Rajya Sabha seat and would contest the Chandigarh Lok Sabha seat.

The former minister said he had been in the public life in the city for the past 54 years. He said he was confident and strongly believed that the party would field him again to serve the people of the city. Bansal had been elected the city MP four times.

He said he understood the city well, knew its problems, its people and the geography better than anyone else. Bansal said he was offered to contest the election outside Chandigarh in the past also but he declined.

Though Bansal refused to comment on filing of applications by other contenders, he said if the Congress chose someone other than him for the ticket, he would support the candidate as a true party worker.

Bansal had won the Lok Sabha elections from the city in 1991, 1999, 2009 and 2014. He served as the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, the Minister for Water Resources, the Minister of State for Finance and Parliamentary Affairs and the Railway Minister.