Kuljeet Singh Sandhu of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got 19 votes on Monday to win Chandigarh’s Senior Deputy Mayor election.
Amid strict security measures, voting for the posts of Senior Deputy Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Chandigarh started on Sunday.
The INDIA bloc (Congress + AAP) received 16 votes, compared to the BJP’s 19 votes. One vote was declared invalid.
With three Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) councillors joining the BJP on Feb 19, the BJP-led bloc, which possessed 14 seats in the 35-member Chandigarh Municipality, saw a surge in power. Punam Devi, Neha Musawat, and Gurcharan Kala, the three council members of the Aam Aadmi Party Chandigarh, joined the BJP in Delhi on behalf of the party, with Vinod Tawde, the National General Secretary, present. The BJP also has support of sole Akali Dal councillor.
The BJP received 19 votes for their candidate with the house’s amended strength, while the Congress-AAP combination received 16 of its total of 17 votes (one vote was deemed invalid).
Gurpreet Singh Gabi, a candidate for the INDIA bloc, lost against BJP candidate Kuljeet Singh Sandhu.
Earlier, the Supreme Court announced AAP councillor Kuldeep Kumar as the winner of the Chandigarh mayoral polls.
This comes after the order of the apex court on the Mayoral polls found that the Returning Officer had purposefully defaced eight ballots cast in support of Kuldeep Kumar to invalidate them.
The decision by Returning Officer Anil Masih, who on January 30 declared BJP candidate Manoj Kumar Sonkar as Chandigarh Mayor, was overturned by a bench consisting of Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra.
After examining the ballots in person, the supreme court concluded that they had not been tampered with. It mandated that Kuldeep Kumar be proclaimed the winner of the 20 votes (12 votes that he received and 8 votes that were cast in his favor but were tampered with by Masih).
The Supreme Court additionally ordered the Registrar Judicial to notify Anil Masih of the impending perjury charges under Section 340 CrPC for his false declaration in court regarding the marking on eight ballots that had been defaced. Masih was chastised by the bench for having “unlawfully altered the course of the mayoral election”.