Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) President Rabi Lamichhane looks set to be reelected from Chitwan-2 by a big margin.
Lamichhane had defeated Umesh Shrestha of Nepali Congress (NC) by over 34,000 votes in November 2022 to get elected as House of Representatives (HoR) member. Lamichhane had secured 49,300 of the 80,753 valid votes while Shrestha had received 14,988. Krishna Bhakta Pokharel of CPN-UML had come third with 14,652.
The constituency of Chitwan-2 became vacant after the Supreme Court (SC) ruled Lamichhane ineligible to become lawmaker as he did not complete the process to re-acquire his citizenship certificate that became invalid after he acquired US citizenship.
Lamichhane has already reacquired citizenship from the Kathmandu District Administration Office while the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) decided to not lodge a case against him in the passport controversy. The people in Chitwan-2 now seem to be eagerly waiting to send him back to the HoR with a landslide win.
Jeet Narayan Shrestha of Nepali Congress (NC) and Ram Prasad Neupane of CPN-UML seem to be competing for the second position.
Setopati reached all the wards in the constituency and talked with 518 voters about the upcoming by-election, their preferred parties/candidates, the reasons for their preference, and the most important issues for them, among other things.
The constituency includes the whole of Kalika Municipality and Ichchhakamana Rural Municipality, and 10 wards of Bharatpur Metropolitan City.
A whopping 315 (60.8%) of the 518 voters Setopati talked to said that they would vote for Lamichhane while just 76 (14.7%) said that they would vote for NC’s Shrestha and 63 (12.2%) for UML’s Neupane. Sixty-four (12.4%) of the voters said that they had yet to decide who to vote for.
Lamichhane had secured almost 61.05 percent of the valid votes five months back and he looks set to repeat the feat if not better it this time.
Lamichhane had won in the last election attracting the traditional voters of NC and UML. The two big parties have been claiming that they will win back their traditional voters this time. Setopati found 20 voters who said they had voted for Lamichhane five months back but would vote for NC (13) and UML (7) this time.
But this looks set to be more than offset as the two parties may also leak more votes this time. The 315 voters who pledged to vote for Lamichhane include 261 who had also voted for him in the last election, 16 who had voted for NC and 18 who had voted for UML while five are first-time voters. Fifteen did not want to reveal who they had voted for five months back.
The 76 voters who said they would vote for NC’s Shrestha include 54 who had voted for NC in November, 13 who had voted for Lamichhane, eight who did not want to reveal who they had voted for, and one who had voted for UML.
The popularity of Lamichhane, who didn’t have party organization in the constituency and contested an election for any kind of public office for the first time in November having recently resigned as journalist, does not seem to have waned despite the SC verdict disqualifying him from lawmaker over the citizenship controversy and the sub judice case brought against the OAG’s decision to not try him for passport controversy.
If anything, the voters seem to believe that the big parties unfairly raised the citizenship and passport controversies, and influenced the SC to disqualify him, and are determined to get him reelected.
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