After initially trailing behind his rival Gulshan Yadav from the Samajwadi Party, Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya has registered victory in the Kunda seat in eastern Uttar Pradesh with a margin of more than 30000 votes as per the election commission website.
Raghuraj Pratap Singh contested on the party ticket that he floated recently, Janta Satta Dal Loktantrik. The SP candidate Gulshan Yadav who is in the second position right now was once known to be the ally of Raja Bhaiya. In the past, Raja Bhaiya has been a close associate of the Samajwadi patriarch Mulayam Singh.
However, with Akhilesh Yadav taking charge, fissures between the strong man and party leadership started to grow. Talking to a news channel during the campaign, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, responding to a question on Raghuraj Pratap Singh, the Akhilesh denied having known him.
More recently Akhilesh tweeted a video of alleged malpractices in a polling booth on March 1st, in which a youth was seen pressing a button on behalf of a woman. The footage, he added, was from Kunda.
While the message was quickly deleted, Raja Bhaiya quickly retaliated against Akhilesh with a screenshot of the now-deleted tweet, pointing out that the footage was from Haryana's 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
"Respected Akhilesh Yadav Ji, you are the national president of the SP and a senior politician, but the video you are using to urge the poll be cancelled is from 2019." "There is too much hostility in politics," Raja Bhaiya wrote.
Others in the electoral fray from Kunda are Sindhuja Bhartiya Janta Party, Yogesh Kumar from the Congress Party, Mohammad Fahim from the Bahujan Samajwadi Party. The constituency has a total population of more than 3 Lakhs and traditionally has been a stronghold of Singh. He has won seven consecutive elections from this seat.
The Kunda assembly seat was a Congress stronghold in the initial years. From 1962 to 1989, Niyaz Hasan of Congress was the MLA here for five consecutive terms. The BJP's last victory here was in 1991 when Shiv Narayan Mishra waved the saffron flag here. He defeated Niaz Hasan of Congress. Since 1993, Raja Bhaiya has won the assembly elections seven times. In the 2017 election, Raja Bhaiya, who contested as an independent, defeated Janki Sharan of BJP by a huge margin of 103647 votes. Raja Bhaiya got 136597 votes in this election. At the same time.
