Going against history, the BJP has given ticket to a regular politician and its former MLA, Dinesh Singh Babbu, from Gurdaspur seat for the upcoming parliamentary elections.
The BJP hasn’t won Gurdaspur even once without the power of stardom. The party had strong reasons to field a parachute candidate, Sunny Deol, from Gurdaspur in 2019 polls, as its experiment with fielding local leaders was never successful.
Bollywood star Vinod Khanna was the first to win the border seat touching Pakistan for the BJP in 1998, with a margin of 1,06,833 votes in alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD).
Before the parachute candidate (Vinod Khanna) landed here, Congress leader Sukhbuns Kaur Bhinder had won the Gurdaspur seat five times in a row.
Just two years before Khanna registered the first victory for the BJP, Bhinder had defeated BJP’s Jagdish Sawhney with a wide margin of 74,547 votes in 1996.
Later, she was defeated by Vinod Khanna three times in a row. Khanna was finally defeated in 2009 by Congress candidate Partap Singh Bajwa with 8,342 votes; again, the margin remained narrow.
As Vinod Khanna passed away in 2017, the BJP gave ticket to Sawarn Singh Salaria, an industrialist-turned-politician, in the by-election necessitated by the actor’s death. But he was defeated with a margin of 1.96 lakh votes by Sunil Jakhar, the then Congress candidate and state president, who was an outsider. Jakhar, who is from Ferozepur, is now the BJP president in the state.
In 2019 general elections, the BJP again banked on Bollywood. This time it was actor Sunny Deol who fought from Gurdaspur, and he didn’t disappoint the BJP. It took Sunny Deol just 20 days after entering politics to defeat sitting MP and seasoned politician Sunil Jakhar. Sunny Deol secured a landslide victory with a margin of 82,459 votes.
While Sunny Deol won the seat for the BJP, he is also the reason that the saffron party now shies away from again fielding a celebrity from Gurdaspur. Another reason is the missing SAD factor this time.