For the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, the Congress on Sunday unveiled its list of ten additional candidates. Among them are former chief minister of Punjab Charanjit Singh Channi, who is running for the Jalandhar parliamentary constituency, and Kanhaiya Kumar, a former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU), who is running for the North East Delhi seat.
Kumar will now take on Manoj Tiwari of the BJP.
The party also unveiled its nominees for the two additional Delhi seats it plans to run for.
Udit Raj will run from the seat in North West Delhi, while J P Agarwal has been nominated from the Chandni Chowk constituency.
Gurjeet Singh Aujla from Amritsar, Amar Singh from Fatehgarh Sahib, Jeet Mohinder Singh Sidhu from Bhatinda, Sukhpal Singh Khaira from Sangrur, and Dr. Dharamvir Gandhi from Patiala are the candidates the party has fielded in Punjab.
Ujjwal Rewati Raman Singh is the candidate of the Congress for the Uttar Pradesh seat of Allahabad.
There will be seven stages to the general elections, which take place from April 19 to June 1. On June 4, the results will be announced.
Kanhaiya Kumar will contest against the BJP MP Manoj Tiwari
Kumar will be facing incumbent North East Delhi MP Manoj Tiwari. The Congress is in a seat-sharing alliance with the AAM AADMI PARTY (AAP) in Delhi, where it will be contesting 3 seats and AAP 4 (East Delhi, New Delhi, West Delhi and South Delhi).
Manoj Tiwari is BJP’s two-time MP from North East Delhi seat after he take down former Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
Kanhaiya Kumar Political Journey from Student Activist to Lok Sabha Election 2019
Kumar is a former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, which first made waves with protests in 2016. A major dispute broke out regarding the slogans chanted during an event held on the university grounds. An FIR was filed against multiple students of the university, him included. He was later arrested for suspected acts of sedition and was later released on bail. Yet, an official investigation determined that there was no recording of him engaging in the alleged ‘anti-national‘ chanting on that evening.
He contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Begusarai on a CPI ticket but lost to Giriraj Singh of the BJP. Kumar joined the Congress in September 2021.
After initially objecting to giving up his sitting seat, Singh relocated to Begusarai from Nawada. Of the total 12.17 lakhs votes cast on April 29, 6.88 lakh were cast for him.
With 2.68 lakh votes, Kanhaiya Kumar—who first gained notoriety after being arrested for sedition while serving as the president of the JNU students union—came in second.
RJD’s Tanveer Hassan, who finished second in 2014, was third with just 1.97 million votes.
The seat was won five years ago by BJP’s Bhola Singh, who died 2018.
A separate 20,408 voters cast their votes for NOTA.