Congress on Monday declared the names of four candidates for the upcoming assembly by-elections, scheduled to take place on October 21, in Punjab. Balwinder Dhaliwal is Congress candidate from Phagwara, while Indu Bal has been given ticket from Mukerian. In Dakha, Congress has nominated Sandeep Sandhu, while Raminder Amla is the party's candidate from Jalalabad.



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Phagwara seat fell vacant after its representative Som Parkash of BJP won the 2019 Lok Sabha poll. Former AAP MLA HS Phoolka resigned as Dakha MLA in January this year. Mukerian seat fell vacant in August after the demise of Congress MLA Rajnish Kumar Babbi. Jalalabad constituency was represented by SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal and it fell vacant after the election of Badal to Lok Sabha.


On Saturday (September 21), the Election Commission announced that bye-elections to 64 constituencies across Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, MP, Meghalaya, Odisha, Puducherry, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh will be held on October 21. The counting will take place on October 24.


Congress returned to power after winning 2017 Assembly poll comfortably., winning 77 out of 117 seats. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which had run a high-voltage campaign in the state managed to get only 20 seats but it beat the BJP-Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) alliance to finish at the second place. The SAD-BJP alliance, which ruled Punjab since 2007, finished with only 18 seats. The Akalis won 15 seats while the BJP won three seats.