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Aakanksha N Bhardwaj
Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, May 23
When Jalandhar Lok Sabha BSP candidate Balwinder Kumar entered into political arena about two years ago as Kartarpur Assembly seat candidate, he was dubbed as a novice and polled about 5,208 votes.
No one could then imagine that he would grow so big in a short span and create history for his party grabbing an unexpected number of 2,04,783 votes and an all-time high vote share of 20.1 per cent in Jalandhar.
More than anything else, he improved his own prospects by six times getting 31,047 votes from the Kartarpur Assembly segment.
He managed to get more votes than his counterparts in Anandpur Sahib and Hoshiarpur constituencies. From Anandpur Sahib, Sodhi Vikram Singh managed to get 1,46,441 votes whereas Khushi Ram from Hoshiarpur got 1,28,564 votes. The percentage of the vote share of Sodhi Vikram Singh and Khushi Ram is 13.54 per cent and 12.98 per cent, respectively.
It is for the first time that the BSP has crossed 2 lakh vote mark here.
Polled more votes than Sukhpal Khaira
Punjab Democratic Alliance (PDA) leader Sukhpal Singh Khaira got 38,199 votes from Bathinda parliamentary constituency. It is the Punjabi Ekta Party (PEP) president Sukhpal Singh Khaira, who had extended his support and had included BSP in the PDA. But Balwinder managed to get a much better result than him.
In the last Lok Sabha elections in 2014, BSP’s Jalandhar candidate Sukhwinder Kotli, now a sarpanch of his Kotli Than Singh village, got only 47,000 votes. Balwinder Kumar, while talking to The Tribune said as he was visiting various counting centres. “We had only got around 7,000 votes in every Assembly constituency, but this time we crossed this mark in first round only,” he said.
“We were marginalised players. Noone used to consider us in the fray earlier. The Congress and the SAD were there and then came the AAP. But we worked a lot and were hopeful to get enough votes,” said Kumar.
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