Bharatiya Janata Party’s Kuljeet Singh Sandhu and Rajinder Sharma defeated their rivals from the Congress to win the posts of senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor, respectively, in the repolls in the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation on Monday.
Sandhu won the post of senior deputy mayor by securing 19 votes. Sharma also got the same number of votes to win the post of deputy Congress’s Gurpreet Gabi got 16 votes. One vote was declared invalid.
As the mayor is the presiding officer for the elections to the posts of senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor, polls were held again.
In the 35-member municipal House, the BJP has 17 councillors. The number of BJP’s strength increased from 14 to 17 after three AAP councillors switched over to it on February 19. The AAP has 10 members while the Congress has seven. The Shiromani Akali Dal has one councillor.
Chandigarh MP Kirron Kher, who is a BJP member, also has voting rights as an ex-officio member of the corporation.
The Supreme Court on February 20 had overturned the January 30 results of the Chandigarh mayoral poll in which the BJP candidate had emerged an unlikely winner, and declared defeated AAP-Congress alliance candidate Kuldeep Kumar as the city’s new mayor.
The process for election for the two posts is being conducted by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) councillor Kumar who recently assumed the charge of Chandigarh mayor. In the January 30 poll, BJP’s Manoj Sonkar had defeated Kumar to become mayor.
Alleging tampering of ballots, councillors of the AAP and the Congress boycotted the elections to the posts of senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor, leading to the victory of Sandhu and Rajinder Sharma then.
This time, too, the BJP has fielded Sharma for the post of deputy mayor. He is up against Congress’s Nirmala Devi.
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