Delhi BJP's last link with Partition; defeated Manmohan in LS polls

In his later years, veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Vijay Kumar Malhotra, who passed away on Tuesday at 94, was better remembered as a sports administrator and the man who in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections defeated Manmohan Singh from the South Delhi constituency.

- ARCHIS MOHAN

It was a crucial election for both. After five years in the Rajya Sabha, Malhotra was trying to get back to the House of the People. For Singh, it was his first foray into electoral politics, and the only one. Malhotra defeated Singh by 29,999 votes, and the BJP swept all of Delhi’s seven Lok Sabha seats.

In the 2004 Lok Sabha polls, Malhotra was the only BJP candidate to retain his Lok Sabha seat, with the Congress winning the remaining six. It proved to be the last Lok Sabha election that Malhotra, a stalwart of the BJP in Delhi, was to contest.