Though the Aam Aadmi Party fared very poorly in the Haryana elections, it has been compensated as it opened its account in Jammu and Kashmir. The party's Mehraj Malik won the Doda seat in the Jammu region with a victory margin of 4,470 votes over his nearest Bharatiya Janata Party rival Gajay Singh Rana.
While Malik had polled 22,944 votes, Rana was at second position with 18,174 votes, and Khalid Najib Suhrawardy of National Conference was at third position with 12,975 votes. The rest of the candidates, including Abdul Majid Wani of Ghulam Nabi Azad's Democratic Progressive Azad Party did not reach even the five-figure mark. The Congress candidate Sheikh Riaz Ahmed was lagging quite far behind with just 4,087 votes.
AAP has snatched the seat from the BJP, which had won the Muslimmajority seat in the 2014 polls, when Shakti Raj Parihar had defeated sitting MLA Wani then in the Congress by a margin of 4,040 votes. National Conference had stood third then also.
Malik, who is a member of the Aam Aadmi Party since 2013, is an elected District Development Council (DDC) Councilor from the Kahara constituency.
Party chief Arvind Kejriwal welcomed his party candidate's victory.
Congratulations AAP's Doda candidate Mehraj Malik for his grand victory by defeating the BJP candidate. You fought a great election, he said in a post in Hindi on X.
Kejriwal also congratulated his party for getting an elected lawmaker in the fifth state.
However, other AAP candidates in J&K did not do as well as Malik, and in Haryana also, where the party was contesting alone because seat-sharing talks with the Congress failed, it made no mark. After all, while the Congress-National Conference is poised to gain a majority in J&K, the BJP seems poised to make a comeback in Haryana for the third term.
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