Hari Dhakal of Rastriya Swatantra Party elected from Chitwan-1

KATHMANDU: Hari Dhakal of Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) has been elected to the House of Representatives from the Chitwan-1 constituency.

He defeated his closest contender Surendra Pandey of CPN-UML by nearly 8,000 votes. While Dhakal received 34,189 votes, Pandey received 26,608 votes.

Bishwo Poudel of Nepali Congress finished third with 24,990 votes.

Both Pandey and Poudel are veteran economists. While Pandey is a former finance minister, Poudel had resigned as the vice president of the National Planning Commission (NPC) – the apex policy-making body of the government – to contest this election.

The main contest was expected to be between these two. But Dhakal came out of nowhere to earn an unprecedented victory.

With this victory, the newly-formed RSP has taken two out of three electoral constituencies of Chitwan. RSP President Rabi Lamichhane has been elected from Chitwan-2 getting nearly 50,000 votes.