Haryana polls: Four-cornered contest to play out in Sohna

Kalyan Singh Chauhan, Javed Ahmed, Dayaram and Subhash Chand are the independent candidates in the fray from Sohna

The battle for the Sohna assembly seat has turned into a tough one for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as well as the Congress this time round due to two strong independent candidates in the fray.

According to political experts, Chauhan is a strong contender since he has been working hard to establish himself in the region. (HT photo)

One of the independent candidates is a former BJP leader who decided to contest on his own after being denied a ticket by the BJP. In addition to this, multiple Muslim candidates used to contest from the seat in the past but this time only two people from the community are contesting.

BJP’s Tejpal Tanwar is contesting from the seat for the second time after 2014 while the Congress has fielded Rohtas Singh Khatana who has a strong presence among the Gujjar voters. Kalyan Singh Chauhan, Javed Ahmed, Dayaram and Subhash Chand are the independent candidates in the fray from Sohna.

According to political experts, Chauhan is a strong contender since he has been working hard to establish himself in the region for the last five years but after the BJP denied him a ticket, he decided to contest independently. Besides, people have seen him working as the chairman of the Zila Parishad too in the past, which is proving beneficial for him in this election.

Jaiveer Yadav, one of the voters from Sohna, said this time the two independent candidates Singh and Ahmed have made things difficult for the two major political parties—the BJP and the Congress. “Ahmed is the only strong Muslim candidate in the constituency which has about 65,000-70,000 minority voters. A major chunk of the votes of this community will be in his favour while other votes will be divided,” he said.

“Chauhan, the other independent candidate will cause a dent in the BJP’s vote share due to two major reasons. He has been working for the people since the last assembly election ended. Secondly, though Tanwar had represented the seat from 2014 to 2019, he somehow got a negative image among the business class due to allegedly shady activities of his son in the area,” Yadav said.

“The Congress candidate has an edge at present but nothing can be clearly said. In the last two assembly elections, it was very evident that BJP candidates were going to win and the results were as expected,” Jagjeet Chauhan, another voter, said.