
Chandigarh: A year after it suffered massive embarrassment when the Supreme Court invalidated the Chandigarh mayoral result in favour of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate, the BJP wrested the post from its rival Thursday. A defection and three cross-votes ensured the victory.
Last year, the Supreme Court intervened after a massive uproar in the House on grounds that then BJP leader and returning officer Anil Masih defaced and tampered with eight ballot papers of the AAP-Congress and declared them invalid, announcing the BJP candidate the winner.
The SC held Anil Masih guilty of tampering and lying in court and declared the AAP-Congress candidate the winner. Masih later offered an unconditional apology in the court and has continued to function as a nominated councillor since then. However, he maintained that he genuinely believed the ballot papers were defaced.
On Thursday, BJP’s Harpreet Kaur Babla was elected mayor, defeating the AAP-Congress joint candidate Prem Lata. Babla got 19 votes to AAP councillor Prem Lata’s 17.
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Babla is a two-time councillor and the wife of prominent Chandigarh politician and state BJP chief Devinder Singh Babla. The couple had long been associated with the Congress but joined the BJP in 2022.
Till last week, in the 35-member House, AAP had 13 councillors and Congress 7, whereas the BJP had 15. In addition, Chandigarh MP Manish Tiwari of the Congress, who also has voting rights, is an ex-officio member.
On Tuesday, senior Congress councillor Gurbax Rawat switched to the BJP, taking its numbers in the House to 16 and reducing the Congress to 7.
However, despite the defection, the total votes of the Congress and the AAP (20) were expected to outnumber the BJP votes (16).
The results were however not as expected and cross-voting by three members led the BJP candidate to win.
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Congress wins senior deputy mayor, deputy mayor post
However, the AAP-Congress combine won both the posts of senior deputy mayor and the deputy mayor. Their candidate Jasbir Singh Bunty defeated the BJP’s Bimla Dubey, for the senior deputy mayor post and, for the deputy mayor’s post, Lakhbir Singh Billu of the BJP lost to their candidate Taruna Mehta. In both cases, one cross-vote took place.
Both Bunty and Mehta are Congress councillors, making AAP the biggest loser in the elections.
Elections to the Municipal Corporation Chandigarh are held every five years. The last polls were in January 2022.
However, elections for the three top positions are held among the elected councillors at the beginning of each year. Since the BJP was the single largest party in the house, its mayoral candidate was elected in 2022 and 2023.
In 2024, the Congress and the AAP came together as part of the INDIA bloc and put up a joint candidate.
For the post of the mayor, they named AAP councillor Kuldeep Singh, while BJP fielded Major Manoj Sonkar.
On voting day, 30 January 2024, CCTV footage purportedly showed presiding officer Anil Masih defacing several ballot papers. He later declared them invalid and announced BJP’s Sonkar as the mayor.
Taking suo motu cognisance of the incident, a three-judge bench led by then Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud set aside the results and Congress-AAP joint candidate Kuldeep Kumar was made the mayor in February last year.
Incumbent mayor moves court
The mayoral elections for this year were initially scheduled for 25 January.
But, ahead of the elections, mayor Kuldeep Kumar moved the Punjab and Haryana High Court pleading for the elections to be postponed till 20 February since he had become the mayor a month late.
He also asked the Punjab and Haryana High Court to change the practice of voting in the elections from secret ballots to an open show of hands to ensure transparency.
Kumar told the court that on 29 October 2024, the Municipal Corporation had resolved to conduct voting by a show of hands instead of through secret ballot.
Taking up the matter on 20 January, a division bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, however, refused to postpone the elections and change the method of voting. However, it ordered that the election be conducted after 29 January.
Kuldeep Kumar then approached the Supreme Court against the high court’s orders, seeking a change in voting method and the appointment of an independent observer to oversee the elections.
Independent observer appointed
On Monday, a division bench of Justices Surya Kant and Kotishwar Singh appointed Jaishree Thakur, a retired judge of Punjab and Haryana High Court, as an independent observer for the mayoral elections.
Thakur visited the Municipal Corporation building in Sector 17 in Chandigarh Wednesday to oversee the preparations for the elections. He was also present during the voting Thursday, along with the Deputy Police Commissioner Nishant Kumar Yadav.
On Thursday, Congress MP Manish Tiwari was the first to cast his vote. Voters were not allowed to show the front of the ballot papers to anyone while casting their vote. No mobile phones, cameras, pens and pencils were allowed during the election process.
Gurbax Rawat, for instance, was only allowed to vote after she removed a watch that she was wearing and the Opposition had objected to.
Fearing cross-voting, BJP councillors had been gathered at Kikar Lodge in Ropar while the Congress councillors were staying put in Ludhiana for the past few days.
Separately, a First Information Report (FIR) was registered Wednesday against Kuldeep Kumar and his brother-in-law Rahul Chanalia by the Chandigarh Police following charges of corruption in the recruitment of contractual sanitation workers in the Municipal Corporation. The former mayor received bail in the matter Thursday morning.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)