Politics and film stars have always made strange bedfellows. But, if what has just come to the attention of PeepingMoon.com is true, then there cannot be anything stranger than this new association that is reportedly in the making.
If our sources are to be believed, then the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is seriously giving a thought to getting Bollywood’s tempestuous actress Kangana Ranaut to stand for the 2019 Lok Sabha election on a party ticket.
And, to bring drama to her political debut at the national level, the BJP is actually said to be considering fielding Kangana from the Gurdaspur constituency in Punjab from which the actor Vinod Khanna last contested and won.
Gurdaspur is one of Punjab’s 13 Lok Sabha constituencies.The seat was held for five terms by the Congress’ Sukhbans Kaur Bhinder between 1980 and 1996. Then Atal Behari Vajpayee and his National Democratic Alliance got Vinod to fight the poll on a BJP ticket and defeat the Congress stalwart in Gurdaspur.
Vinod, whose charisma more than his political acumen made him fascinating to voters, contested the next four Lok Sabha polls for the BJP from Gurdaspur before he was defeated in 2009 by the Congress’ Pratap Singh Bajwa.
With Narendra Singh Modi urging the country to vote the BJP and him to power in 2014, Vinod returned to Gurdaspur and in a return-revenge match defeated Bajwa to retain the constituency for the BJP again. The seat fell vacant when the former Bollywood superstar passed away of cancer in April 2017. A by-election was held in October between 11 candidates to fill the seat and the Congress’ Sunil Jhakar wrested it out of the BJP’s hands.
But now, with Kangana coming out openly in favour of the BJP and expressing her support to Prime Minister Narendra Modi with statements like “he is the rightful leader of the democracy and he deserves to come to power again”, the party might just get the National Award winning actress to fight for it from Gurdaspur.
While Kangana has been flirting with politics lately she has never expressed her intention to stand for elections. It was always felt that BJP president Amit Shah would get the actress to be the party’s star campaigner in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Will there be a twist to this tale? And will Kangana, after the release of her biographical epic Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi in January 2019, give herself up to politics?
