Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Tuesday named the comedian-turned-politician Bhagwant Mann as the party’s Chief Ministerial candidate for the Punjab Assembly polls scheduled for 20 February. Mann’s candidature was announced by the AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal after the former received 93 per cent votes (of 21 lakh participants) in the televoting held by the party to receive people’s suggestions for the CM candidate. “Wherever I went (during the poll campaign in Punjab), everyone asked me dulha kaun hoga (who will be the groom (CM candidate)?). We decided to ask three crore people of Punjab. Ninety-three per cent favoured Mann,” Kejriwal said. Though Mann, 48, has had his own string of controversies earlier including reported drinking problem, the two-time Member of Parliament (MP) from Sangrur remains the most popular face of the party in the Sikh majority state. window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.defineSlot(`/96277396/single-article-ad-new`, [300, 250], `div-gpt-ad-1616332879619-0`).addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.enableServices(); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(`div-gpt-ad-1616332879619-0`); }); Besides being a Jat Sikh, a caste which comprises about 20 per cent of the total voters in Punjab, Mann belongs to Malwa region of the state. Of the 117 Assembly seats in Punjab, 69 seats in Malwa region alone. In 2017 Assembly polls, AAP won all of its 20 seats in Malwa region. Thanking people for choosing him as CM candidate, Mann said his dream is to make Punjab drug free, to provide sufficient employment, best and free education and he wants to make Punjab’s agriculture and farmers prosperous, and he’ll not rest until all these dreams come true. On his reported drinking problem, Mann said his rivals have nothing else to say. “There is no corruption, no Enforcement Directorate raids, no Income Tax raids, I have a clean image…I still live in a rented house…They have been saying this for me for 11 years. But people have given me big wins after that. All this talk is baseless,” he said after being named AAP’s CM candidate.

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