EC data at 1.30 pm: AAP candidate 4,558 votes ahead of BJP’s Gajay Singh Rana; leads NC’s Khalid Najib Suharwardy by 10,000.
New Delhi: Mehraj Malik, the Aam Aadmi Party candidate who gave his party its first electoral win in Jammu and Kashmir during local body polls in December 2020, has now won the Doda legislative seat, giving the AAP its first Assembly seat in the erstwhile state. Jammu and Kashmir is holding its first Assembly election after a decade.
AAP chief concluded 4,538 votes ahead of BJP’s Gajay Singh Rana and thumped the National Conference’s Khalid Najib Suharwardy by 9,894 after the scheduled 13 rounds of counting.
The BJP’s Shakti Raj won the Doda seat in the 2014 election, but it has traditionally been held by the National Conference or the Congress since the first poll in 1962.
Many people are surprised by this, even if it is small: the AAP won in J&K but was blanked in Haryana, the home state of party boss Arvind Kejriwal. Should that trend hold- and there is nothing to suggest that it will not -the consequences will be extremely serious, quite simply because the Delhi election is just months away.
