Haryana polls: BJP MLA Anil Vij wins Ambala Cantt seat for 7th time

Haryana Assembly elections: After hours of counting, trends showed that six-time BJP MLA Anil Vij was leading by 5,000 votes in Ambala Cantt.

Haryana Assembly elections: While his Bharaitya Janata Party is likely to make a comeback in Haryana for the third time, six-time MLA from Ambala Cantt, Anil Vij, has retained his seat for the seventh time, the Election Commission website showed on Tuesday.

Vij defeated his rival Chitra Sarwara by a margin of about 7,200 votes, a smaller compared to the nearly 20,000 margin of 2019 Assembly polls. Sarwara was expelled from Congress ahead of the elections for “anti-party” activities after she filed her nomination as an independent.

Congress has fielded Parvinder Singh Pari as its candidate. Notably, Sarwara is the daughter of Nirmal Singh, another Congress candidate from Ambala. 

Ahead of the polls, Vij expressed his ambition to run for the chief ministerial position, even though BJP had announced that outgoing Chief Minister Nayab Saini would continue in the role if the party returned to power. Vij, the most senior BJP MLA in Haryana, served as home minister under Manohar Lal Khattar’s government.

Savitri Jindal wins in Hisar

Meanwhie, India’s richest woman, Savitri Jindal, has won the Hisar seat as an independent candidate. Jindal, who joined BJP before the Lok Sabha elections, filed her nomination as an independent after the saffron party denied her a ticket. BJP candidate and incumbent MLA Kamal Gupta trails by over 4,000 votes, currently in third position, while Congress’ Ram Niwas is in second.

With a net worth of $33 billion, Jindal is the chairperson of the multinational Jindal Group. At 74, she is the widow of industrialist O P Jindal. She served as a Congress representative for Hisar twice, beginning her political career in the 2005 by-election following her husband’s death in a helicopter crash. She won again in 2009 and later served as a minister in the Bhupinder Hooda government. Her son, Naveen Jindal, is a BJP Lok Sabha MP from Kurukshetra.