AAP wins two seats in Punjab, Gujarat

New Delhi: Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal on Monday hailed the party’s performance in the Gujarat and Punjab bypolls, asserting that there would be a “bigger storm” of AAP in the 2027 Punjab Assembly elections as people have decided to reject both the BJP and the Congress.

The AAP leadership said the bypoll results show that Kejriwal has made a “powerful comeback” to national politics after the party’s defeat in the Delhi Assembly elections in February this year.

Former Delhi minister Saurabh Bharadwaj said the party’s victory is a huge setback to the BJP, which was claiming that it had finished AAP after the Delhi Assembly polls. AAP leaders claimed that this is a morale boost for the party’s grassroots workers.

In Punjab, AAP retained the Ludhiana West Assembly seat with its candidate Sanjeev Arora registering a victory in a fierce electoral fight against his nearest rival and Congress candidate Bharat Bhushan Ashu by a margin of 10,637 votes.

Addressing a press conference after the results, Kejriwal claimed that people are quite happy with their government in Punjab. Arora is a Rajya Sabha MP from the AAP-ruled Punjab and he will have to resign from the Upper House.

In Gujarat’s Junagadh district, former AAP state president Gopal Italia emerged victorious in Visavadar, defeating BJP’s Kirit Patel by 17,554 votes.

Kejriwal said AAP had won both Visavadar and Ludhiana West seats in the Gujarat and Punjab elections respectively in 2022. But now the party has won the two seats with double the margins of what it got in 2022, he said.

The AAP supremo said this was a “huge indication” that people were “quite happy” with the party government’s work in Punjab. AAP had won 92 seats out of 117 in Punjab at that time and it was said there was a storm of AAP.