New Delhi: Fighting a battle of prestige, Bihar Deputy Chief Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate Samrat Choudhary has a whopping lead of 30,000-plus votes in Tarapur after 20 rounds of counting.
Choudhary had secured over 83,000 votes till 3.27 pm.
A Member of the Legislative Council (MLC), Choudhary in the past had contested from his home district Munger. Facing a triangular contest in Tarapur, he is pitted against the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Arun Shah and Jan Suraaj Party’s Dr. Santosh Singh.
Choudhary, an OBC leader, has also served as the state president of Bihar in the past. He joined the BJP in 2017 after starting his political journey with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in 1999 and switching to the Janata Dal (United) in 2014. He had also served as a minister in the government headed by Rabri Devi, wife of RJD veteran Lalu Prasad Yadav.
The BJP candidate’s father Shakuni Choudhary is a founding member of the Samata Party with several stints as MLA and MP. His mother, Parvati Devi, had once represented Tarapur constituency. Choudhary in the past won two assembly elections (2000 and 2010) while he also lost twice (in 2005 and 2015).
Mewa Lal Choudhary of JD(U) is the sitting MLA from the constituency and had retained the seat in the 2015 as well as the 2020 assembly elections. The seat is considered a stronghold of the JD(U).
Choudhary, who courted controversy over his educational qualifications as well as murder charges, has been an MLA twice from the Parbatta constituency, which is part of Khagaria district.
He was also under fire after Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) leader Prashant Kishor made serious allegations against him regarding falsifying his age and educational qualifications and linked him to the decades-old Shilpi-Gautam murder.
Kishor had accused Choudhary of not clearing matriculation exam, and many within the BJP felt his failure to give a proper response to these allegations had dented his image among the people. Though speaking to ThePrint, Choudhary had refuted the allegations.
In July, Kishor had claimed that Choudhary had submitted a false affidavit, which resulted in the cancellation of his election due to discrepancies regarding his age.
“I have all the documentation concerning Samrat Choudhary. He failed in the seventh grade. The real name is Rakesh Kumar. The court had annulled his membership of the Legislative Assembly for submitting a false affidavit as an MLA. It’s amusing to see that this individual resurfaced under a new identity, Rakesh Kumar alias Samrat Choudhary,” Kishor alleged, as reported by ThePrint in August.
“Now, Rakesh Kumar has vanished, leaving only Samrat Choudhary. Examining his affidavits from the last two elections, it’s astonishing that his age jumped to 48 in just ten years. While our age naturally increases by ten years, his age claims an increase of 38 years. In merely a decade, he went from being in the seventh grade to earning a D.Litt. (Doctor of Letters, after PhD),” he claimed.
Following these allegations, the BJP filed an FIR against Kishor, accusing him of damaging Choudhary’s reputation.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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