India Votes 2024: Can Hema Malini Charm Mathura Again?

In 2014, she won her first Lok Sabha election from Mathura.

She polled 674,633 votes (or 53.29%) to the Rashtriya Lok Dal's Jayant Chaudhary's 243,890 votes (22.62%).

Five years later, she polled 667,342 votes (60.77% of the votes cast) while her opponent, the RLD's Kunwar Narendra Singh, polled 377,319 votes (34.36%).

Hema Malini is a rare Bharatiya Janata Party star politician who has been asked to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha election for a third time.

Her step son Sunny Deol, who won the Gurdaspur seat in 2019, was dropped by the MoSha combine which runs the BJP, as was fellow Juhu resident Kiron Kher, who represented Chandigarh in the Lok Sabha after the 2014 and 2019 elections.

Hemaji also bucked MoSha's 75 year rule where BJP politicians retire from electoral politics after they turn 75 (she turned 75 on October 16, 2023).

Can Hemaji win a third term in the Lok Sabha, a rare occurence for a lady movie star politician?

Vinod Khanna, who played Raja Bhojraj to Hemaji's Mirabai in Gulzar's 1979 film Meera, is the only star politician to have won four elections to the Lok Sabha -- from Gurdaspur in 1998, 1999, 2004 and 2014.

IMAGE: Hemaji addresses the National Chamber of Commerce and Industries Association in Mathura.

IMAGE: The association felicitated Hemaji, here and below.

IMAGE: Rashtriya Lok Dal chief President Jayant Singh Chaudhary -- her opponent in her first Lok Sabha contest, now on the same side as her -- and Hemaji hit the campaign trail.

IMAGE: Hemaji addresses an election meeting at Baldev town in Mathura.

IMAGE: Hemaji harvests wheat during the campaign. Did we see something like this in Veer Zara?

INDIA VOTES, 2024

Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff.com and Anant Salvi/ Rediff.com
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com

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