Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Haryana unit chief Sushil Gupta, to contest 2024 parliamentary elections from Kurukshetra, on Sunday said that the people of the State want change both at the Centre and in Haryana.

He expressed his confidence that the candidates of INDIA bloc (Congress and AAP) will win all the Lok Sabha seats in the State. As part of the arrangement between the two parties in Haryana, AAP has fielded its state president Gupta from Kurukshetra while the Congress will contest the remaining nine seats in Haryana.

Notably, BJP had won all the 10 seats in Haryana in 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Parties like BJP, Congress, INLD and JJP are yet to declare its candidates in all the 10 parliamentary seats of the State.

Gupta, talking to reporters in Kurukshetra, said that every worker of the two parties is working hard. “Besides, we are getting full support from senior Congress leaders Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Randeep Singh Surjewala, Kiran Choudhary, Kumari Selja and the local leaders in Kurukshetra constituency,” he added.

Gupta said that there will be a ‘dharma yudh’ in Kurukshetra. “It will be against corruption, against what BJP did to the farmers and against the drug menace,” he said.

At the state level, AAP would raise issues like the drug menace, “increasing” crime, farmers’ issues, lack of good schools and hospitals, and unavailability of round-the-clock power. “There is an undercurrent and people want change both at the Centre and in Haryana,” he added. 

On Kurukshetra's sitting MP Nayab Singh Saini, who is also the state BJP chief, Gupta said: “People of his constituency say that he has hardly been seen here. If the party fields him again from Kurukshetra, he will lose his security deposit…We talk of good governance...We are confident that the INDIA bloc will form the government at the Centre after the Lok Sabha polls.”

Targeting the BJP, Gupta said: “They are destroying democracy. Everyone knows what happened in last month's Chandigarh municipal polls, it became a national headline. Unemployment is a big issue at the national level. People are also seeing how the BJP is targeting opposition leaders.”