Shimla: Anil Sharma, a last-minute Congress turncoat, has registered a handsome win from the Mandi Assembly seat in Himachal Pradesh. Anil Sharma of the Bharatiya Janata Party won 25,202 votes beating Indian National Congress party’s Champa Thakur who got only 16,701 votes.
Media reports said that voters seem to have ignored Sharma’s Congress background and his father’s tainted past. Anil Sharma is the son of the original telecom scam icon Sukh Ram. His son Ayush Sharma is an aspiring film actor and related to Salman Khan now after he married Salman’s sister Arpita.
He was Himachal Pradesh Rural Development Minister before quitting the Virbhadra Singh government to join the BJP. Soon after leaving the Congress, Anil Sharma had said that he and his father were being sidelined and ignored in the Congress party.
The Mandi seat was represented by Sukh Ram from 1962 till November 1984, when he was elected to Lok Sabha and his protege DD Thakur won the seat in 1985 while the BJP wrested the seat in 1990. In the 1993 Assembly poll, his son Anil Sharma won from Mandi but after Sukh Ram’s name surfaced in the telecom scam, he was expelled from the Congress and formed the Himachal Vikas Congress (HVC) which entered into a post poll alliance with BJP and joined the government.
While Sukh Ram won from Mandi, Anil Sharma was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1998. In the 2003 Assembly polls, Sukh Ram was the sole HVC member to win the election from Mandi but he joined the Congress ahead of the 2004 Lok Sabha polls. Anil Sharma again won from Mandi in 2007 and 2012 as a Congress candidate and as a BJP candidate this time.
