Delhi Election Result: The curious case of Shoaib Iqbal and other turncoats

Shoaib Iqbal is one man no party in Delhi would say no to, especially in an election season. Since 1993, he has won six times, including the 2019 Assembly polls, and that too contesting from five parties!

Except for the 1993 and 1998 polls, Iqbal always contested on a different party and won. If in 1993 and 1998, he contested on a Janata Dal ticket, in 2003, he switched over to JD(S), only to win again. In 2003, he became the Deputy Speaker when Sheila Dikshit government was in power.

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Five years later, Iqbal again contested but this time from Ramvilas Paswan-led LJP. In 2013, he switched sides to Nitish Kumar-led JD(U).

Only once he read the tea leaves wrong and that was in 2015 when he joined Congress to fight the elections. He lost in an AAP wave that swept the capital then.

But as the latest edition of elections came near, the astute politician was ready for another electoral battle and mended fences with AAP, which could not resist inducting him in January, a month before the polls.

AAP was looking for a candidate in Matia Mahal where it had fallen out with its sitting MLA and former Minister Asim Ahmed Khan, who accused Kejriwal and his aides of demanding Rs 5 crore from him, and it was willing to forget that once Iqbal had remarked that the place for the AAP chief was in jail.

For AAP, eight out of the nine political turncoats it fielded in the elections won while BJP could manage to get only one as the winner. The only one who lost was Ram Singh Netaji, who left Congress to join AAP.

All those sitting MLAs who left AAP for Congress, like Alka Lamba and Adarsh Shastri, lost miserably. So was the case with other sitting MLAs N D Sharma (BSP) and Surender Singh (NCP). For BJP, Anil Bajpai, who left AAP, managed to win.

Lamba managed just 3,881 votes in Chandni Chowk while Shastri in Dwarka got 6,757 votes, Singh got 908 votes in Delhi Cantonment and Sharma 10,436 in Badarpur. In Gokalpur, AAP MLA Fateh Singh, who joined NCP to fight the polls after being denied a seat, managed just 420 seats while the winner Surender Kumar, who left BJP to join AAP, bagged over 88,000 votes