Switching sides didn't help, turncoats get big drubbing from AAP

All the turncoats who switched to the Bharatiya Janata Party prior to the polls were beaten by massive margins by Aam Aadmi Party candidates.

The victory margin in each of these cases was above 20,000 votes.

Prominent among these electoral losers were Krishna Tirath and Vinod Kumar Binny. A veteran Congress leader at one time, Tirath had switched to BJP only a few days before BJP announced its list of candidates.

 She was given a seat from Patel Nagar where she struggled during campaigning to inform voters that her election symbol had changed from the hand to lotus.

It appears her defeat had little to do with the mere confusion over the symbol as she lost by 34,638 votes to AAP’s Hazari Lal Chauhan. The AAP candidate at 68,868 votes polled more than double of Tirath.

The other notable defeat of a turncoat was that of Vinod Kumar Binny who lost to senior AAP leader Manish Sisodia by over 28,000 votes.

Binny had contested the 2013 Assembly elections on an AAP ticket, but rebelled against the party soon after and was expelled. He then joined the BJP to fight against Sisodia.

Two other former AAP legislators M S Dhir and Ashok Kumar Chauhan had switched to the BJP when it was doing well. Chauhan had won the Ambedkar Nagar seat in 2013, but was badly beaten this time by AAP’s Ajay Dutt. Chauhan polled only 24,172 votes as compared to Dutt’s 66,632 votes.

Dhir suffered the least humiliating defeats of all these BJP leaders, losing by 20,450 votes to AAP’s Praveen Kumar from the Jangpura constituency. He had won the same seat the last time.

It is unlikely any of these politicians will switch parties again anytime soon. Dhir’s wife told Deccan Herald that the decision to join BJP was well thought out.

“He will be with the BJP lifelong now,” she said.