Chandigarh: The Aam Aadmi Party, keen to shrug off the ‘outsider’ tag, has nominated a son of the soil, Bhagwant Singh Mann, as the party’s chief ministerial face in Punjab.
A twice sitting MP from Sangrur, Mann is a satirist, poet and Punjabi TV, film comedian; his onscreen witticisms and rustic appeal have endeared him to the public, but owing to his lack of administrative experience, the AAP was a trifle reluctant to name him the chief ministerial face. To ward off criticism, an ingenious dial-a-phone opinion poll was conducted under the tagline ‘Janata Chunegi CM.’
Speaking at a press conference, AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal said that unlike other parties, which pick their nominee behind closed doors from among pre-determined official choices, AAP had, in an unprecedented move, ascertained the people’s preference by opening telephone lines to the public.
``We received over 21 lakh responses of which 93% favoured Mann as CM’s face’’, Kerjriwal said, making it out to be a far more democratic exercise than detractors would concede.
The AAP has pinned its hopes on Mann as he represents the Malwa region, which has the maximum -- 69 assembly seats and where the party won 18 seats in the 2017 polls. (For political greenhorns, the state of Punjab, with 117 assembly seats, comprises three regions -- Majha and Doaba being the other two.)
Unlike in 2017, which was AAP’s first election in Punjab, the party this time has not only the Delhi governance model to showcase, but it has also worked hard in Majha and Doaba.
The Punjab assembly elections are scheduled to be held on February 20 and the votes would be counted on March 10.
Mann, 48, alias Jugnu, entered politics in 2012 when he unsuccessfully fought assembly election from Lehra seat in 2012 on People’s Party of Punjab ticket. He joined AAP two years later and won the parliamentary election from Sangrur by a huge margin of over 2 lakh votes. In 2019, he won the seat again, though the margin fell by over 1 lakh votes.
In the 2017 assembly polls, the Congress had won an absolute majority in the state by winning 77 seats, ousting the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party combine government after a decade. The AAP had then emerged as the second-largest party with 20 seats, followed by the SAD which managed to secure 15 seats. The BJP could bag only three.
Punjab, this time, will witness a four-corner fight between the Congress, the AAP, the SAD-BSP combine as well as the alliance of the BJP and the Punjab Lok Congress (PLC), which was floated recently by former chief minister Amarinder Singh. The BJP-PLC combine is yet to finalise their seat-sharing arrangement.
