The Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) has registered a victory in all the 5 municipal corporations of Haryana, consisting of 110 wards.
The elections, which were held on 16th December, witnessed 69 per cent turnout out of 14 lakh eligible voters. The polls for mayor and ward councillors were held in five towns of Rohtak, Karnal, Hisar, Panipat and Yamunanagar along with ward councillor polls for two Municipal committees of Jakhal Mandi in Fatehabad and Pundri in Kaithal district.
In a first, the mayors of the cities were elected directly instead of being chosen by the councillors in Haryana. The poll results are seen significant for the incumbent BJP government after a setback in the Hindi heartland states of Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh in recent assembly elections. They are crucial from the point of view of coming 2019 General elections also.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar had personally campaigned in the polls. In Khattar’s hometown of Karnal, INLD, BSP and Congress had backed an independent candidate Asha Wadhwa to defeat BJP. However, BJP candidate Renu Bala Gupta managed to win all the 21 wards of Karnal by a margin of around 9 thousand votes.
BJP candidate Man Mohan Goyal won former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s town Rohtak Congress-backed candidate Sita Ram by a margin of 14,776 votes.
In Hisar, BJP candidate Gautam Sardana defeated Rekha Aren with a margin of 28,091 votes. Madan Singh Chauhan defeated Congress-backed Rakesh Kumar Sharma with a margin of 40,678 votes on the seat of Yamunanagar. In biggest of them all, BJP candidate Avneet Kaur defeated Congress-backed Independent candidate with a margin of whopping 74,940 votes.
For the very first time in civic polls, choice of NOTA or none of the above was converted into a fictional candidate by the election commission. Every candidate would have to garner more votes than NOTA in order to save the deposit. In case no candidate gets more votes than NOTA, polls will be conducted again.
BJP contested from all the seats of Mayor and of 107 wards of Municipal Corporations, BSP from 1 seat of Mayor i.e. Yamunanagar, CPI (M) contested from one seat of Mayor i.e. Rohtak and INLD contested the election from 3 seats of Mayor i.e. from Hisar, Panipat & Rohtak.
