Among the top leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the names of Congress leader Kanhaiya Kumar, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman come to anybody's mind once the university's name crops up.
But no alumnus of the prestigious university in the national capital has had a steep rise in politics as Kanhaiya Kumar, whom the BJP has combined with "tukde tukde gang", a term used for alleged supporters of secessionism.
As a student leader from the All India Students federation of the regimented Communist Party of India, he rose to fame as JNUSU president whose arrest rocked the entire nation peaking at his release, followed by a fierce speech in JNU that was watched by a record half of the country on all TV channels in 2016.
Though he contested the 2019 national polls from Bihar's Begusarai from CPI ticket, he lost to Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Giriraj Singh. Kanhaiya Kumar later joined the Congress in 2021 citing the need for a bigger goal post.
Kanhaiya Kumar's participation in Bharat Jodo Yatra soon propelled him to the centre-stage owing to his clarity and oratorial skills. Besides becoming a Congress national spokesperson, he became the in-charge of the party's student wing, the National Students' Union of India last year.
Now that he is reckoned as the star campaigner after the Gandhi family members, the Congress named Kanhaiya Kumar as its Lok Sabha candidate from North East Delhi, one of the three seats it is contesting in the Capital in alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). JP Agarwal (Chandni Chowk) and Udit Raj (North West Delhi) are the two other Congress candidates in the race from Delhi.
