Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal, Minister of NRI Affairs, will run for the Lok Sabha seat from Amritsar

Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal, the AAP’s Minister of NRI Affairs, was optimistic about winning the seat for the party after the party declared it will re-field him from the Amritsar Lok Sabha constituency.

In the Ajnala area, where he was elected to the state legislature in 2022, Dhaliwal promptly addressed a hastily organized news conference after the party’s revelation of its first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha elections, which included his name.

With 20,087 votes, or 2.34 percent of the total votes cast, he was the party’s nominee for the Amritsar constituency in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Gurjeet Singh Aujla, a Congressman, won the poll handily with more than 4.45 lakh votes. Riding the tide of AAP support, Dhaliwal was victorious in the 2022 Assembly election from the border seat of Ajnala.

He had an association with the Congress in the early years of his political career. Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal apparently renounced his American citizenship in order to run in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. At the time, Dhaliwal said that he had made a pledge to party chief Arvind Kejriwal in 2015 that he would make such sacrifices for the party. He came back to the US in 2014 to become involved in politics after living there for 13 years. Dhaliwal said that he was chosen as Jagdev Kalan village’s sarpanch before to leaving for the US. He was involved in organizing the yearly Hasham Shah Mela at the ancient Jagdev Kalan hamlet, which is close to Amritsar. He had completed his matriculation from his village’s Government school.

He claims that the main accomplishment of his time as an MLA was wresting 11,000 hectares of government property back from private ownership.

For the fourth consecutive time, the AAP will run a candidate for the Lok Sabha constituency in Amritsar. In 2014, it had first considered the nominee from this area, the late Dr. Daljit Singh, a well recognized ophthalmologist worldwide. It has nominated former Akali leader Upkar Singh Sandhu in the 2017 parliamentary election. Sandhu and Dr. Singh had both lost the polls.