Who Is Valmiki Nagar's Second Term MP Sunil Kumar? (image-Facebook/Sunil Kumar)
Janata Dal (United) candidate and sitting MP Sunil Kumar secured a second term from Valmiki Nagar with 5,23,422 votes, defeating RJD candidate Deepak Yadav with a significant margin of 98,675 votes. Yadav bagged 4,24,747 votes.
Kumar won the seat in the by-elections held in 2020 following the death of his father and then sitting MP, Baidyanath Mahto. Kumar defeated Congress candidate Pravesh Mishra by a margin of around 22,539 votes. His father represented the Valmiki Nagar seat in 2009 and 2019, where he won the seat with a huge margin of 3.5 lakh votes against Shashwat Kedar from Congress.
The BJP candidate Satish Chandra Dubey won the seat in 2014. Dubey expressed his interest in contesting the elections in the 18th Lok Sabha elections from the seat; however, the NDA’s seat-sharing arrangement led to the renomination of JD(U)’s sitting MP.
Although the RJD candidate enjoyed a considerable amount of popularity among the sugarcane farmers in the region, Kumar has an upper hand in terms of popularity thanks to the Modi factor. Meanwhile, Yadav led his campaign with an emphasis on the main issues bothering the locals, such as floods, droughts, the issues of sugarcane farmers, and migration due to unemployment.
Against the JD(U) candidate in the party’s citadel is RJD’s Deepak Yadav, a local sugar mill owner from Haryana who has a decent popularity and support among the farmers. Notably, before securing the RJD ticket, Yadav was an active member of the saffron party. Yadav led his campaign with an emphasis on the main issues bothering the locals, such as floods, droughts, the issues of sugarcane farmers, and migration due to unemployment.
