With his party winning three of the four Assembly seats in Punjab where bypolls were held,
senior Aam Aadmi Party leader Raghav Chadha has said the results are a stamp of approval for the Bhagwant Mann government in the state under the leadership of party chief Arvind Kejriwal.
Speaking to news agency ANI on Saturday, Mr Chadha pointed out that these three seats had never been won by the AAP before and also reflected on the results in Maharashtra - where the INDIA bloc was routed - and Jharkhand - which it retained - saying that it was a case of 'kahin khushi, kahin gham' (happiness in one place, sadness in the other).
"The results of the Punjab bypolls are very encouraging and I congratulate the workers of the AAP. The work of Bhagwan Mann's government under the leadership of Arvind Kejriwal has been given a stamp of approval by the people. The three seats - Chabbewal, Gidderbaha and Dera Baba Nanak - that we have won today are constituencies where the AAP has never won," he said in Hindi.
"When the Punjab Assembly elections were held in 2022, there was a tsunami in favour of Aam Aadmi Party, but we still could not win these seats. This shows that people have been influenced by the work done by our government in the past two-and-a-half years," he added.
The Rajya Sabha MP said that even in the fourth seat of Barnala, the AAP had lost by a slim margin.
Responding to a question on the Maharashtra and Jharkhand results, Mr Chadha said, "It is a case of 'kahin khushi, kahin gham' for the INDIA alliance. The bloc lost in Maharashtra and the Eknath Shinde government and the coalition got an important victory. In Jharkhand, a negative type of politics, vendetta politics, has been rejected by the people, who have given a big mandate to Hemant Soren and the INDIA alliance. I believe that, with the Jharkhand victory, the negative kind of politics will weaken or end and the politics of governance development will get an impetus."
The MP also said that a discussion will be held on the Maharashtra results after they have been analysed.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
