The ruling BJP on Friday trounced the rival Congress by retaining the post of Mayor and Deputy Mayor in the South Delhi Municipal Corporation with comfortable margins, even as all five AAP MlAs chose to give the high-stake mayoral polls in the civic body a miss. Unlike last year’s SDMC mayoral polls in which the Congress had lost to the BJP by a solitary margin, this time BJP’s candidate Subhash Arya defeated senior Congress leader Farhad Suri by 19 votes.
71-year-old Arya, currently the chairman of SDMC’s standing committee, polled 60 votes, while Suri received 41. Five area MPs — Maheish Giri, Ramesh Bidhuri, Parvesh Saheb Singh Verma, Meenakshi lekhi, and Parvez Hashmi — eligible to vote in the polls, were the early ones to exercise their franchise. The AAP, however, chose to stay away from the polls, as all of its five newly-elected MlAs and a councillor failed to show up, reducing the strength of electors from 107 to 101. Suri, who served as a Mayor during the period of the erstwhile unified MCD, was anticipated to give an even fight to Arya, but fortune swung the BJP way, as the party maintained its supremacy in the civic body.