AAP's Punjab CM face Bhagwant Mann to contest from Dhuri
Darpan News Desk The Canadian Press, 20 Jan, 2022 11:55 AM
Chandigarh, Jan 20 (IANS) Two-time Member of Parliament and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief ministerial candidate Bhagwant Mann will be contesting from Dhuri in the February 20 polls in Punjab.
The announcement was made by state affairs co in-charge Raghav Chadha in Mohali on Thursday.
"Mann is a pan-Punjab leader and will campaign for party candidates across the state. We are the only party to go into the polls with a CM's face," Chadha told reporters. He also said Mann and Arvind Kejriwal form a formidable team.
Mann, 48, is pitted against Congress sitting legislator Dalvir Singh Goldy where former Sangrur MLA Parkash Chand Garg is in the fray as the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) candidate.
The Sanyukt Samaj Morcha, an outfit floated by 19 farm organisations, has fielded former sarpanch Sarabjit Singh Alal as its candidate.
In 2017 Assembly polls, Goldy defeated AAP's Jasvir Singh Jassi Sekhon by a slender margin of 2,811 votes.
The Dhuri Assembly constituency falls in the Sangrur parliamentary seat that commedia-turned-politician Mann, 48, is representing.
The AAP has so far named candidates on 112 of the 117 Assembly seats.
In the 2017 assembly polls, the Congress won a whopping 77 seats in the 117-member House, while SAD-BJP combine could win only 18 seats. AAP emerged as the second-largest party with 20 seats.
The detection of two cases of Omicron, the latest variant of Covid-19, in Karnataka was not unexpected in view of the interconnected world that people live in, Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director, WHO South-East Asia, said on Thursday.
In a major reprieve to traders ahead of the assembly polls, the Punjab Cabinet on Wednesday decided to exempt about 1.50 lakh cases from assessment related to cases of 'C' form from 2014-15 to 2017-18.
Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader Manjinder Singh Sirsa on Wednesday joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ahead of the next year's Punjab Assembly elections.
Stating that the BJP government should stop attempting to divide farmers even at this stage - two days after the three farm laws were repealed in the Parliament, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha on Wednesday on condemned the government's statement that it does not have data about farmers' death.
Leaked toxic Methyl IsoCyanate (MIC) gas from the Union Carbide of India Ltd (UCIL) factory started affecting the residents of Madhya Pradesh capital city Bhopal, especially those residing in the southeast direction from the factory, around 2 a.m. on the intervening night of December 2 and 3 in 1984.
The Indian government, before taking any final decision on the resumption of international flight operations, is "closely monitoring" the situation emerging out of the detection and spread of coronavirus' Omicron variant.
