Ranju Darshana Neupane, the candidate of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), has won the House of Representatives election from Kathmandu-1.
She secured 15,455 votes to win a seat in the House of Representatives. An official announcement of the final result, however, is yet to be made.
Neupane, who was running for the House of Representatives for the second time, defeated her main rival Prabal Thapa of the Nepali Congress by a significant margin. Thapa received 6,364 votes.
Senior Vice-chairman of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party, Rabindra Mishra, who had been a strong contender in previous elections, secured 3,972 votes. Mohan Regmi of the CPN-UML finished fourth with 1,618 votes.
Neupane entered politics through the civic movement, Bibeksheel Abhiyan. She first rose to prominence during the 2017 local elections, when she ran for mayor of Kathmandu Metropolitan City. She received more than 23,000 votes in that mayoral race.
In the 2022 House of Representatives election, she ran as an independent candidate from Kathmandu-5 but failed to secure the expected votes. Contesting the election with the symbol “a stack of sel roti,” she received only around 600 votes at the time.
After that setback, Neupane stepped back from politics but made a comeback after joining the Rastriya Swatantra Party.
She previously served as the general secretary of the Bibeksheel Sajha Party. After the party merged with the RSP, she became a member of the party’s central committee.
Initially, Neupane was placed on the RSP’s proportional representation closed list. However, she was dissatisfied as her name was placed low on the list. The party later withdrew her name and fielded her as a direct candidate from Kathmandu-1.
Neupane is also a new mother and had little time to go on door-to-door campaign. A photo of her going to vote while carrying her 10-day-old baby went viral on social media during the election.
