Haryana assembly elections 2019: Gold medallist Babita Phogat loses first political contest from Dadri seat

Independent candidate Sombir, a BJP rebel, bagged 43589 votes, JJP’s Satpal Sangwan got 29319 votes and Phogat managed 24502 votes.

Commonwealth Games double gold medalist and BJP candidate Babita Phogat crashed in her bid to make a political debut by losing from Haryana’s Dadri. She stood third behind the winner, an independent candidate, and a Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) candidate.

Independent candidate Sombir, a BJP rebel, bagged 43589 votes, JJP’s Satpal Sangwan got 29319 votes and Phogat managed 24502 votes. Results and leads in Haryana point to a hung assembly with the Congress and the BJP in a neck-and-neck race.

Babita and her father Mahavir Singh Phogat had joined the BJP on August 12. On the reason for joining politics, Babita had said, “Sportspersons have a shelf life. I wanted to get into active politics because there are a lot of social evils and systemic deficiencies which need to be corrected. For doing so one has to get inside the system.”

“Politics is not new for our family. My mother has remained a village sarpanch for long. I had learned the manoeuvres of wrestling and politics since my childhood,’’ Phogat had said.

In the 2014 Haryana Assembly elections, Rajdeep of INLD won in this seat by defeating the BJP candidate

by a margin of 1610 votes. The INLD had a vote share of 32.82% in 2014 in the seat.

The BJP has never won this Jat-dominated Assembly segment where caste remains a major factor.

Dadri is part of Bhiwani-Mahendragarh Lok Sabha constituency. A total of 17 candidates contested in

the elections.

The constituency had a total of 2,09,063 eligible electors, of which 1,12,272 are male, 96,790 female.

Dadri has witnessed close fights in the last four assembly elections with the difference in votes between

the winner and the runner-up being less than 2,000. No political party has won two consecutive elections from the constituency.