The Chandigarh Mayoral Polls scheduled for Tuesday are all set to be a one-on-one contest between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with both parties having 14 Councillors each in the municipal corporation. The Congress party, which has six Councillors, has decided to abstain from voting.
AAP has fielded its Councillor Jasbir Singh for the post of Mayor while BJP has fielded Anup Gupta.
Elections for the posts of Chandigarh Mayor, senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor are held every year during the five-year term of the MC House. In the first term in 2022, the BJP had clinched all three posts. This time, Congress has not fielded any candidate.
To avoid poaching, four days before the high-stakes mayoral elections, AAP, BJP and Congress have moved their councillors to stations in Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, the states ruled by them, respectively.
In the 35-member MC House, both the AAP and the BJP have 14 members each, while six councillors are from the Congress and one is from the SAD. However, the BJP has an edge due to another vote of a member of Parliament and ex-officio member Kirron Kher. If all councillors vote for the Mayor, a candidate would need to secure at least 19 votes, but in case, both the Congress and the SAD abstain from voting, a majority of 15 votes will be required for a win.
The municipal corporation elections held in December 2021 saw the emergence of AAP in Chandigarh as it won 14 seats, whereas the BJP and the Congress managed to win only 12 and 8 seats respectively.
In the 2022 mayoral polls, BJP's Sarabjit Kaur defeated Anju Katyal of the AAP by a narrow margin. A total of 28 votes were polled out of 36. While the BJP won 14 votes, AAP won 13, and one vote was ruled invalid. Days ahead of the 2022 mayor polls, Congress Councillor Harpreet Kaur Babla had joined the BJP taking the party's tally in the house from 12 to 13. In June 2022, another Congress Councillor Gurcharan Jeet Singh Kala joined the BJP, bumping the party's strength in the house to 14, which has now made the Mayor election a neck and-neck battle.
The categories for the first term is reserved for a woman candidate from the general category, the second is for any candidate from the general category, the third is for a candidate from the scheduled caste category, the fourth is for a woman candidate from the general category, and the fifth is for the general category.