Punjab Congress working president Ashu served as MLA twice from this seat in 2012 and 2017. The 51-year-old was defeated by Gurpreet Bassi alias Gogi by a margin of 7,512 votes in the 2022 Punjab assembly polls. Ashu, who was food and civil supplies minister in the previous Congress government, recently got a clean chit from the Punjab and Haryana High Court in a corruption case, but was unable to emulate his earlier victories.The BJP failed to capitalise on the momentum from last year’s Lok Sabha polls, despite aggressive campaigning by Union Ministers Ravneet Singh Bittu and Hardeep Singh Puri, former Union minister Anurag Thakur, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta, Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini and Punjab BJP president Sunil Jakhar. Party candidate Jivan Gupta, who is a member of the core committee of the Punjab BJP and was earlier the party’s state general secretary, got 20,323 votes translating into a vote share of 22.54 per cent. Expectations had been high for the saffron party after its candidate Ravneet Singh Bittu had led from the Ludhiana West assembly segment, which is part of the Ludhiana Lok Sabha seat, in last year’s general elections, though he lost to Congress candidate Amrinder Singh Raja Warring.Meanwhile, the downslide of the Shiromani Akali Dal continued as the bypoll result marked another low. The party’s candidate Parupkar Singh Ghumman was at the forth sport with 8203 votes, which is 9.1 per cent of the vote share, despite campaigning by party president Sukhbir Singh Badal and senior leaders including Bikram Singh Majithia. In the 2022 assembly polls, senior party leader Maheshinder Singh Grewal got 10,072 votes.
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