Too many Jarnail Singhs spoiled the party of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate Jarnail Singh in the West Delhi Parliamentary seat in the national Capital. A break-up of votes garnered by the other two Jarnail Singhs who fought as Independents got a combined tally of almost over 90,000 votes.
Had it not been for these two candidates, AAP candidate Jarnail Singh could have given a stronger fight to the West Delhi seat and margin of victory could have been far less. AAP candidate must be ruing the fact that his opponents played a dirty trick to defeat him and the two namesakes were fielded with the sole motive to defeat him.
Despite securing over lakhs of votes, security of Independents Jarnail Singh was forfeited as they failed to obtain 1/10 of the total vote polled in the constituency. The symbol for one of the Independent candidates, Jarnail Singh was a torch and it closely resembled AAP’s broom. The other Jarnail Singh has a shuttlecock as his symbol. Jarnail Singh having torch symbol has obtained 84,722 votes while Jarnail Singh having shuttlecock symbol could be managed only 5,960 votes. Interestingly, the AAP had earlier written to the Election Commission about the similarity of party symbols, as they can seem confusing to the electorate. AAP’s Jarnail Singh is quite well-known for he had earlier hurled a shoe at the then Union Home Minister P Chidambaram for giving a clean chit to Sajjan Kumar in the 1984 riots Sikh genocide in the national Capital.
AAP candidate seems to have got votes of 1984 riots sympathisers and some votes in unauthorised colonies which were considered as Congress vote bank. “Too many Jarnail Singh in the fray confused voters who preferred voting for the BJP instead,” said an AAP supporter in West Delhi.