New Delhi: Congress leader Aditya Surjewala, son of All India Congress Committee General Secretary Randeep Surjewala, has won Haryana’s Kaithal assembly seat by a margin of 8,124 votes against Bharatiya Janata Party’s Leela Ram.
At 25, Aditya was the youngest candidate in the fray in the Haryana assembly elections.
Soon after being declared the winner, he held a roadshow in Kaithal. He told media persons, “This is the victory of the power of the youth. It is the victory of Kaithal. I thank all those who made this win possible.”
The contest in Kaithal was being viewed as a litmus test for the Surjewalas’ political future. The Surjewala family has previously won the seat three times—Shamsher Singh Surjewala in 2005, and Randeep in 2009 and 2014.
Aditya’s principal rival was 63-year-old sitting MLA Leela Ram, who had defeated Randeep by a slim margin of 1,246 votes in the 2019 assembly elections. Leela Ram had also served as the Kaithal MLA between 2000 and 2005.
A graduate from the University of British Columbia (BC) in Canada, Aditya was referred to as ‘Videshi (foreigner)’ by Leela Ram during the election campaign.
Aditya’s election rallies and roadshows were a big talking point ahead of the polls as they attracted huge crowds, particularly the youth. His campaign was largely focused on dealing with the issues of unemployment and inflation.
In one of his public meetings, he had said, “When I went to Canada in 2018, I would not see many youngsters from our area there. In 2023, I met youth from Haryana who had moved there after realising that there were no job avenues back home. My heart ached seeing that.”
Randeep had also aggressively campaigned for his son by recounting the developmental work accomplished in Kaithal during his and his father Shamsher Singh’s tenure.
Aditya is the third member of the Surjewala family to enter Haryana’s political landscape. In 1993, senior Congress leader Shamsher Singh Surjewala had launched 26-year-old Randeep, fielding him from the Narwana assembly constituency for a bypoll after he was nominated for the Rajya Sabha.
Though Randeep lost that election against former Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala, he defeated him in the 1996 assembly polls.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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