Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate Amanatullah Khan is leading in Okhla constituency by a margin of 36,970 votes over his nearest rival Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate Braham Singh.
Shaheen Bagh, the epicentre of protests against the Centre’s discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and Jamia Nagar are part of this constituency.
The BJP had tried to make the protests at Shaheen Bagh a major poll point in this election with party leaders, including Amit Shah and Yogi Adityanath, trying to discredit the peaceful sit-in.
Last year, the Delhi Police, in December last year, had entered the Jamia Millia Islamia University campus and beat up students and staff members. Khan had met the Jamia students and in an interview with HuffPost India’s Akshay Deshmane, Khan had said, “The way in which the police entered the university premises, attacked boys and girls studying there, is wrong. It cannot be tolerated. There should be a judicial inquiry into this, And whoever is faulty should be revealed”.
Khan had won from Okhla in the 2015 Assembly elections, defeating Singh with over 60,000 votes.