New Delhi: Surprise Congress candidate for North-east Delhi, Kanhaiya Kumar, formerly JNU Students Union President, filed his nomination papers from the constituency.
The Indian Express said he was “leading a spirited procession, with supporters chanting “hathi ghodha paalki, jai kanhaiya lal ki.”
After filing his papers, as per PTI, he said, “We want jobs for the youth of northeast Delhi, we want relief from GST imposed on shopkeepers, we want a minimum pay of Rs 400 for labourers. We want peace, justice, and growth.”
Today is the last day to file nominations for the Lok Sabha polls in Delhi, which votes on May 25. Twenty-four people have filed papers in Northeast Delhi, the highest in the city so far.
BJP has Manoj Tiwari, Bhojpuri singer and its two-term MP as its candidate once again from here. It is a large constituency with many migrants from UP and Bihar. Delhi has gone BJP’s way with the party making a clean sweep in all seven seats despite AAP scoring heavy wins in the assembly polls.
This time, AAP and Congress are in alliance, with AAP fighting on four seats and Congress on three. The choice of candidates and the alliance led to a revolt in the Delhi Congress and led to the re-defection of Arvinder Singh Lovely to the BJP. Congress has tried to control the situation by quickly appointing a working president, Devender Yadav, who took over the reins on May 5. The BJP clocked over 58% of the vote share in 2019, and AAP’s biggest campaigner and chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, is in jail. But the campaign for precisely these reasons promises to be interesting.
Hailing from Bihar’s Begusarai, Kanhaiya’s tryst with student politics began when he was studying at the College of Commerce in Patna.
Born in 1987, Kanhaiya obtained a graduate degree in Geography, and then went on to obtain a doctorate in African Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2019. His autobiography, Bihar to Tihar: My Political Journey, was published in October 2016. It is about his childhood in rural Bihar, college days in Patna, and political coming of age in Delhi, by fire in February 2016, when a march in JNU came under a concerted attack over false sloganeering that was alleged to have taken place. JNU became a big centre of the resistance and not only by the central university students. It became a central point for rallying political parties in the country too.
Kumar contested from Begusarai in the 2019 polls on a CPI ticket. Begusarai is meant to be part of an old CPI belt that runs through Bihar. But it is believed that RJD, being reluctant to cede space to another young leader, also put up a candidate there and Giriraj Singh, minister in BJP’s cabinet, won the seat.
