For the Chandigarh Lok Sabha seat, the BJP on Wednesday replaced two-time sitting MP Kirron Kher with Sanjay Tandona former Chandigarh BJP chief and the son of former Punjab Deputy CM Balram Das Tandon. Here are the reasons why the party preferred a new candidate over the incumbent MP.
Ten years into her Lok Sabha tenure, Kirron Kher has failed to get rid of the “outsider” tag. Only last month, the actor-politician said, “I left my family and profession to live and work in Chandigarh for the past 10 years”. But senior BJP leaders insisted that a local candidate should be preferred. Kher’s name was missing from the list of four names the local selection committee sent to the central leadership, citing that people in Chandigarh need “a local candidate” this time.
2021 civic polls an eye-opener
The December 2021 civic polls in Chandigarh, in which debutant AAP won a majority, were an eye-opener for the BJP. While the AAP got 14 councillors in the general house of the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation, the BJP tally came down from 20 seats in 2016 to 12.
Respective local track records
Sanjay Tandon is the longest-serving president of Chandigarh BJP, holding the post from 2010 till 2019. It was during Tandon’s stint that the party won the Lok Sabha polls back-to-back as well as the Chandigarh civic elections. After this success, Tandon became the co-in-charge of Himachal Pradesh BJP. Tandon’s father Balram Das Tandon, a lifelong RSS worker, was the Punjab deputy CM from 1969 to 1970 and later the Governor of Chhattisgarh between 2014 and 2018.
The Congress’s Pawan Bansal won Chandigarh three straight times starting in 1999. In 2014, the BJP fielded Kher in what was her debut election. Asked about her tenure, Federation of Sector Welfare Associations of Chandigarh chairperson Baljinder Singh Bittu told The Indian Express“None of the city’s outstanding issues has been resolved. Traders are suffering, and so are residents of housing boards… She did nothing and spent her MPLAD budget on insignificant civic works. It is different when a local candidate is your MP.”
He alleged there was no significant work done in the last 10 years. Bittu also spoke of Kher’s alleged unavailability, contradicting her claim. “People couldn’t meet her. She was hardly there in Chandigarh. Had she been repeated this time, people wouldn’t have voted for her… They wanted a local candidate,” he said.
Damage control
After the fiasco during the Chandigarh mayoral polls in February in which presiding officer Anil Masih was caught on security cameras invalidating votes of AAP and Congress councillors to give the BJP a win — it was overturned with a stern rebuke by the Supreme Court — the party is desperate to repair the damage. The controversy, just a month before the Lok Sabha polls were announced, has greatly dented the party’s image. A candidate change deflects some of the negativity surrounding the party at the moment.
Accessibility, visibility, no to ‘celebrity’
Down the years, Tandon’s accessibility and visibility in Chandigarh played a big part in the ticket going to him. On the other hand, despite Kher having prepared for an honourable exit by announcing she was keeping unwell, there was an undercurrent of anti-incumbency against her.
Local BJP leaders concede that Kher got a second chance in 2019 only “due to a Modi wave”. “If Kher got another chance, it was due to the Modi wave. When PM Modi addressed a rally here in 2019, he only told people to vote for him… He didn’t mention Kher even once,” said a senior BJP leader in the Union Territory.
