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With the Golden Temple and Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) headquarters located in Amritsar, the seat is the bastion of Sikh Panthic politics.
Despite the legacy, Congress’ Raghunandan Lal Bhatia, a Hindu, represented the constituency in the Lok Sabha on half a dozen occasions. This is the highest for any MP elected from the constituency.
Amritsar has long been a bastion of the Congress, with the Grand Old Party emerging victorious in 13 of the 20 Lok Sabha polls and bypolls held between 1952 and 2019.
However, the political landscape shifted after 2004, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) making significant inroads, largely due to the popularity of cricket-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu.
Bhatia, who won the seat in 1972, 1980, 1985, 1992, 1996, and 1999, lost to Sidhu, the BJP candidate supported by the Shiromani Akali Dal, in 2004.
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Sidhu won the seat in a bypoll in 2007 and again in 2009 until he made way in 2014 for BJP's Arun Jaitley to contest.
Sidhu's wife, Navjot Kaur, was a BJP legislator from the Amritsar East Assembly constituency in 2012, a seat which Sidhu represented as a Congress candidate in 2017.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Jaitley lost to Congress' Amarinder Singh. In 2019, Congress' Gurjeet Singh Aujla defeated Hardeep Singh Puri of the BJP with a margin of around 100,000 votes.
While Jaitley became the country's finance minister in the first Narendra Modi government, Puri has handled key portfolios since 2019.
Sikhs comprise over 50 per cent of the constituency's electorate.
In 2024, the BJP and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) are not allies. Interestingly, the SAD, Punjab’s 'Panthic party', has fielded a Hindu in Anil Joshi, and the BJP's candidate is a Sikh in Taranjit Singh Sandhu, a former envoy to the US, whose family has deep roots in Amritsar.
Gurjeet Aujla, the Congress candidate, is eyeing a hat-trick in the seat after winning the 2017 bypolls. This was necessitated when Amarinder Singh quit the seat since he became the chief minister of Punjab, and the 2019 polls.
Aujla was in the limelight last year when he snatched a canister from a person in what he perceived was a 'bomb' and ran towards the exit of the Parliament building during the December 13, 2023, bomb scare.
The incident continues to resonate among the people in the constituency.
Meanwhile, the AAP has fielded Kuldeep Dhaliwal, a minister in the Punjab Cabinet, and a legislator from Ajnala, one of the nine Assembly segments that fall within Amritsar parliamentary constituency.
The AAP had won seven of the nine segments in the 2022 Assembly polls.
