Chandigarh: Senior leader Manish Tewari is the Congress’s choice for the Chandigarh parliamentary seat as the party looks to buck the Bharatiya Janata Party’s winning streak in the seat.
The 58-year-old has replaced the Congress’s stalwart Pawan Kumar Bansal (75) as candidate for the upcoming Lok Sabha election.
Chandigarh will vote during the last phase, on June 1.
Incidentally, Tewari and Bansal’s rivalry goes back a long time. Chandigarh has remained Tewari’s top choice since the beginning of his political career in the 90s. But Bansal’s long dominance over this seat scuttled his chances, forcing him to forge ties with Congress leaders in Punjab for his political survival.
He first entered parliament from Punjab’s Ludhiana in 2009. In 2019, he was elected from Anandpur Sahib, an important Sikh pilgrimage site.
Now, the Chandigarh Congress unit’s demand for a fresh face has tilted the scales in Tewari’s favour, signalling the end of road for Bansal, a four-time MP who enjoyed close ties with Sonia Gandhi and the late Ahmed Patel.
Not an easy fight for Tewari
Chandigarh as a constituency only has a total 6.5 lakh registered voters, of whom nearly half are below 39 years of age.
But the peculiarity of this seat is that the elections here have often been dominated by national political trends, given that it is a centrally administered Union territory.
During 10 years of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance regime between 2004 and 2014, Pawan Bansal had been undefeated as the Congress candidate.
Since 2014, the city voters have sided with BJP. The fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was once the party’s Chandigarh in-charge helped its local nominee and actor Kirron Kher connect with city voters better. She registered easy wins against Bansal in the 2014 and 2019 parliamentary polls.
BJP has again centred Chandigarh polls around Modi’s image to register its third successive victory even though it had to drop Kher and pick local leader Sanjay Tandon – ostensibly to beat anti-incumbency.
It is in this context that Tewari enters the poll fray in Chandigarh. Poll observers believe that the fight will not be easy for Tewari given that the Modi factor remains relevant here despite the change of candidate in Chandigarh.
But Tewari has a young and clean image that suits the city’s character. Besides, his old city connections and long experience in winning elections on various turfs may favour him.
Tewari will also get the backing of Congress’s INDIA alliance partner Aam Aadmi Party, which recently fought a fierce legal battle against BJP to claim Chandigarh’s mayoral post after the rigged elections.
Local AAP leader Prem Garg told The Wire that his party would fully support the Congress in Chandigarh.
Chandigarh Congress president H.S. Lucky also told reporters that the local party cadre was elated with the decision, as they wanted a fresh face with a clean image.
Tewari, a former union minister and a practising Supreme Court lawyer, will most likely focus his election campaign on local issues to counter BJP.
He will also revive his old connection with the city. Tewari’s father, the late V.N. Tewari was a professor at Panjab University in Chandigarh and also a Rajya Sabha member. He was murdered during militancy in Punjab in 1984.
His mother Amrit Tewari was also a professor and headed the oral sciences department at the city’s premier government health institute, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research.
Born here in 1965, Tewari completed his schooling and graduation from the city before pursuing his law degree in Delhi.
