JJP fields IIM-A alumnus as its Ggn candidate

Gurgaon: The Jannayak Janta Party (JJP), which is fighting the Lok Sabha elections in alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Haryana, on Monday fielded Mehmood Khan, an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad, as its candidate from Gurgaon.
While it has pitted its party chief Dushyant Chautala’s younger brother Digvijay Chautala (also the party’s student wing national president) against Congress stalwart and former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda in Sonipat, it has nominated Jai Bhagwan Sharma, alias DD Sharma, from Kurukshetra.

The JJP-AAP combine has now announced all 10 candidates for the state. While the JJP will contest seven seats, ie. Gurgaon, Rohtak, Hisar, Sirsa, Sonipat, Kurukshetra and Bhiwani-Mahendragarh, the AAP has fielded candidates in the remaining three, ie. Faridabad, Ambala and Karnal.

Eyeing the nearly five lakh Muslim votes in the Gurgaon Lok Sabha constituency, the JJP hopes to cater to both the minority community and the urban voters spread across the Gurgaon and Badshapur assembly constituencies by nominating Khan, who was named ‘Person of the Year 2009’ by Forbes India.

Khan, who left a high-flying corporate career in London to return to his roots in rural Mewat, has worked as the global leader of innovation process development at Unilever. He is the only Muslim candidate in Gurgaon, which has a sizeable number of Meo-Muslim votes.

His candidature could queer the pitch for Captain Ajay Yadav, the Congress candidate, who too has been pinning his hopes on the Muslim vote.

In Sonipat — one of the three Jat-dominated Lok Sabha seats in Haryana besides Hisar and Rohtak — the JJP’s Digvijay Chautala (27) is expected to face a tough battle against Hooda, a prominent Jat leader, and sitting BJP MP Ramesh Chandra Kaushik. The party was earlier considering nominating a gold-medalist woman wrestler from the seat.

In Kurukshetra, a seat currently held by Raj Kumar Saini, Jai Bhagwan Sharma is pitted against the BJP’s Nayab Singh Saini and Congress’s Nirmal Singh.

A three-time sarpanch of Kheri Markanda village, Sharma has been politically active since his college days.

A prominent businessman in Kurukshetra-Kaithal region, he had unsuccessfully contested the assembly election from Pehwa on a BJP ticket in 2014.