Gurugram: Actor and Congress leader Raj Babbar is leading against his nearest rival Rao Inderjit Singh by a margin of 2,626 votes from the Gurgaon Lok Sabha seat in Haryana, according to the Election Commission of India (ECI) data as of 2.10 pm.
A former president of the Uttar Pradesh Congress, Raj Babbar’s name was cleared by the party’s central leadership 30 April, ignoring senior party leader and former Haryana minister Captain Ajay Singh Yadav’s bid to contest.
Raj Babbar (71) is an actor who has featured in Hindi and Punjabi films and has been in active politics since 1989 when he joined the V.P. Singh-led Janata Dal. After five years with Janata Dal, he joined the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party before he rejoined V.P. Singh in Jan Morcha in 2006 and then the Congress in 2008.
A three-time Lok Sabha MP and a two-time Rajya Sabha MP, Raj Babbar was sent to the Rajya Sabha in 1994 by the SP and remained a member till 1999. In the 1999 LS polls, Babbar became the Agra Lok Sabha MP as an SP candidate by defeating Bharatiya Janata Party’s Bhagwan Shankar Rawat by a margin of 1.13 lakh votes. He won this LS seat again as an SP candidate in 2004 by defeating BJP’s Murari Lal Mittal Fatehpuria by a margin of nearly 58,000 votes.
However, in 2006, the SP suspended him for his outburst against then-party general secretary Amar Singh, whom he accused of promoting “broker culture”. Later, when he joined the Congress in 2008, Babbar contested a by-election from the Firozabad LS seat in 2009 and defeated Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav from the SP to enter the Lok Sabha for the third time.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, General (retd.) V.K. Singh from the BJP defeated Babbar from the Ghaziabad LS seat by a margin of over 5.6 lakh votes.
In October 2016, he was named president of the Uttar Pradesh Congress, but in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he lost to BJP’s Rajkumar Chahar by a huge margin of over 4.9 lakh votes from the Fatehpur Sikri LS seat. In October 2019, the Congress replaced him with Ajay Kumar Lallu as the party’s state president.
Rao Inderjit Singh has won all three elections held for the Gurgaon Lok Sabha seat ever since it was carved out during the delimitation exercise in 2007-08. He won as a Congress candidate in 2009 and on the BJP’s ticket in 2014 and 2019. He won the 2019 one by a margin of over 3.86 lakh votes against Captain Ajay Singh Yadav of the Congress.
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