'Ram' is always a winner in Hajipur seat

Call it a sheer coincidence, but it’s a fact that ever since Hajipur was converted into a reserved seat from a general quota constituency in 1977, the Lok Sabha candidates who won from here since then had a ‘Ram’ in their names.

Be it Ram Vilas Paswan, Ram Ratan Ram or Ram Sundar Das, all belonging to different political parties, have been winners from here in the last 37 years.

The first to win from Hajipur after it became a reserved constituency was Ram Vilas Paswan, who, riding on an anti-Indira Gandhi wave, won with a huge margin. His name was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for winning with a margin of 4,25,545 votes. He bettered his own record when he won in 1989 by a margin of 5,04,448 votes (Although this record was broken in 1991 when PV Narasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister, won the Nandyal bypoll in Andhra Pradesh by a margin of nearly 5.8 lakh).

Earlier, Paswan had won from Hajipur in 1980 LS polls too, but he lost to Congress’s Ram Ratan Ram in 1984, when there was a huge sympathy wave in favour of the grand old party following Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

In 1991, former chief minister of Bihar, Ram Sundar Das of the Janata Dal won from Hajipur. But from 1996 onwards, Ram Vilas Paswan won the next four consecutive elections including 1998, 1999 and 2004 Lok Sabha polls. His winning streak came to a halt when Ram Sundar Das of the Janata Dal (U) defeated him in 2009.

In the 2014 polls too, Paswan is again pitted against 93-year-old Ram Sundar Das, perhaps the oldest candidate in the fray. As Hajipur goes to polls on May 7, no matter who wins, one thing is for sure — he has to be a Ram, again.